Invisible Spectrum 5 year celebration
For several years now, POI has hosted an annual engagement and outreach event with the Bangladeshi community in Ireland. Known as Invisible Spectrum, this initiative serves to promote awareness of cancer symptoms, encourage uptake of cancer screening programmes, break down communication barriers between the attendees and the medical/scientific communities and encourage an interest in research amongst the attendees.
We were delighted to recently reach the 5-year milestone of this great initiative and thought that this was an event worthy of a celebration.
We hosted a very special edition of Invisible Spectrum on the evening of Monday, 18th November in SBI, UCD. Following a different format to previous years, this event served as a celebration of the long-running success of the Invisible Spectrum programme, highlighting some key outcomes and achievements and recognising everyone who has contributed their time and efforts over the past 5 years.
It was wonderful to welcome back so many individuals we've worked with over the years on this initiative and thank them for their involvement. This included both academic staff who each year take time out of their busy schedules to give talks, host workshops and assist with event organisation but also to members of the Bangladeshi community itself, who have been key drivers of this programme from the start, providing essential feedback, contributing to co-organisational meetings, providing assistance with translations and community outreach and most importantly, attending and participating so enthusiastically each year.
We were also very excited to publicly present for the first time, an outline of the organisational blueprint that we have developed over the years. This blueprint, alongside other key learnings and outcomes from the Invisible Spectrum programme, is currently being prepared for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. We hope that once published, it may serve as a guiding example for other groups who wish to organise similar engagement initiatives with minority communities.
Thank you to everyone who attended and and has been a part of the Invisible Spectrum journey over the past 5 years.
Attendees at the reception event
Invisible Spectrum team with Bangladeshi community leaders
Left: Jessica Ralston, Walter Kolch, Arman Rahman, Md. Mostofa
Right: Arman Rahman, Walter Kolch, Shayla Sharmin
Invisible Spectrum speakers
Top (left to right): Walter Kolch, Arman Rahman, Jessica Ralston,
Bottom (left to right): Shane O'Grady,Dr. Mohammad Jaigirdar, Md. Mostofa
