What's happening in 2021?

Dear Pint supporter,

Each year hundreds of volunteers donate tens to hundreds of hours of their time to Pint of Science to make the festival what it has grown to be. They are leaders, facilitators and go-getters who have helped bring science out of the lab and into the local community.

It is their passionate dedication that made cancelling last year’s festival so devastating. Even with the first strict national lockdown announced only two weeks later, it was still heartbreaking as it felt we had effectively discarded those efforts.

Over the New Year period we have seen a number of small outbreaks that have, rightly, led to rapidly implemented lockdown measures at local and state levels. Vaccine progress is promising, but the TGA are yet to authorise any vaccine in Australia and an effective roll out will take months.

With this context we have chosen to focus our efforts in 2021 online rather than in-person pub events. We cannot risk having to cancel local events again this year. We hope that we are doing this unnecessarily!

So - what will #PintAU21 look like? Well - that’s where you come in.

Over the next few weeks, we will be running a volunteer recruitment round for roles both in our national and ‘project’ teams. Concurrently with this drive, we’ll be workshopping ideas of our activities to run during 2021.

Somewhat similar to last year, we’re going to take this year as an opportunity to experiment with online forms of science engagement.

Head over to our roles page on our website to see how you can get involved.

And even if you aren’t able to commit to volunteering, but you’ve got an awesome idea on what you think we should do, please do let us know. Write to us and give us a few key points and we’ll consider it over the next few weeks.

Finally, if you’re a researcher who’s keen to present your work, regardless of the format, there’s a section in the same form linked to from the roles page. We’ll also do a specific call-out for presenters once we’re confident on the suite of activity for this year.

Happy New Year from everyone here at Pint of Science. We hope that you are keeping well and look forward to seeing you, virtually, in May.

Tom and Jirana

co-CEOs
Pint of Science Australia