It has been six months since I launched Elysium London. No team, no investment, no partners. Just a conviction, built over five years of practice, that the way inclusive research is held in this country needs to change, and that I could contribute to changing it.
This is a reflection on what those six months have looked like, what they have taught me, and where we are headed.
Where I Started
I need to go back before Elysium London to explain why it exists.
My career in public health research began in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a community researcher at Centric Community Research. Over five years I progressed to Director, leading and delivering more than twenty projects across NHS trusts, universities, local authorities, integrated care systems, and VCSE organisations. Centric was built on a principle I still carry: that communities are not research subjects. They are knowledge-holders, capable of shaping questions, leading fieldwork, and interpreting findings on their own terms.
I watched community researchers grow into confident practitioners who understood that their lived experience was an asset, not a token gesture. A series of projects with Impact on Urban Health brought this into sharp focus. Our community-led research on air pollution directly influenced the design of their Amplifying Voices strand, part of their £40 million, ten-year programme addressing the disproportionate health impacts of air pollution in Lambeth and Southwark. That went beyond consultation. Community insight shaped how a major funder allocated resources.
But across more than twenty projects, I kept seeing the same thing. Strong work, real impact, and then the funding cycle ends, the work gets put on pause and the momentum built with community dissipates. The system was not designed to hold what we were building. In my first white paper, Strategic Frameworks for Inclusive Research, I tried to make sense of that gap. I called it the Interspace: the translational space between institutions and communities that no single actor is resourced or mandated to hold.
That understanding is what led me to start Elysium London.
What Six Months Has Looked Like
Starting a consultancy from scratch, without institutional backing, is a particular kind of education. You learn quickly what resonates and what does not.
In the early months, I had more than twenty structured conversations with commissioners, research leads, VCSE leaders, funders, and community organisations across South London. I was not trying to sell anything. I wanted to understand, from as many vantage points as possible, what was working and what was not in how inclusive research was being commissioned, delivered, and sustained.
What I heard, consistently, was a sector under strain. People at every level described the same frustrations: a lack of infrastructure to support the inclusive practice they were mandated to deliver, knowledge generated in one project that never reached the next, community relationships built and then lost when funding ended, and standards that varied so widely the terms “community research” and “inclusive research” had started to lose their meaning.
Those conversations shaped everything that followed.
Over six months, Elysium London has grown from an idea into a working consultancy. I have worked with and learned from some brilliant people and organisations along the way. I delivered a national workshop on inclusive research and co-design in digital health with King’s Health Partners Digital Health Hub, reaching over ninety professionals. I am advising King’s College London’s Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care on their Inclusive Research and Education Practices (IREP) project. I serve as a team member on the Community-Led Research Collaboration at the Ideas Fund, hosted by the British Science Association and funded by Wellcome Trust. And I am forming new collaborations with organisations including the Society of Radiographers, facilitated through Turning Tables.
I want to thank every person and organisation that has backed our work so far.
What I Have Learned
The conversations and the delivery work have confirmed something I suspected but could not fully articulate when I started. The problems facing inclusive research are structural, not incidental.
Four patterns keep showing up:
- Funding processes disadvantage community-led approaches: The processes through which research is funded, governed, and ethically approved systematically disadvantage adaptive, community-led work. Funding requires institutional language. Ethics systems are designed for fixed-protocol research. Commissioning timelines are too short to build the trust that inclusive research depends on.
- There is no stewardship: Responsibility for inclusion is dispersed across disconnected teams, from engagement officers to EDI leads to programme managers, with no end-to-end accountability. When staff move on or funding ends, relationships collapse and learning disappears.
- Standards are incoherent: “Community research” and “inclusive research” now describe everything from deeply relational, community-led practice to extractive, short-term consultations. There is no shared benchmark to tell the difference.
- Inclusion is frequently tokenistic: Institutions recruit for demographic representation rather than genuine proximity to the issues being studied. Community insight gets captured but rarely makes it into the decisions that affect people’s lives.
These failures sit at the level of system design, not individual organisations. And they have real consequences. Health inequalities cost the English economy an estimated £31 to £33 billion per year in lost productivity (Marmot Review, 2020). Black women in England remain nearly three times more likely to die during or shortly after pregnancy than white women (MBRRACE-UK, 2023). In the most deprived areas, people can expect to live almost two decades less in good health than those in the wealthiest (Marmot Review, 2020). The investment is there. The infrastructure to make it count is not.
Where This Is Leading
Everything I have learned over the past six months has gone into a single document.
Today I am publishing The Inclusive Research Collaborative: An Evidence-Based Case for New Infrastructure in South London. It is Elysium London’s second white paper and the most significant piece of work I have produced. The paper draws on national evidence and five years of practitioner experience to make the case for a new kind of infrastructure: a practitioner-led intermediary designed to hold inclusive research as a sustained system function, not a series of disconnected projects.
It sets out the structural failures I have described above in full, proposes a model built around stewardship, translation, and capability-building, and maps the pathways through which it could be realised in South London. It is a diagnosis, and it is a practical proposal for what comes next.
You can read the full paper here.
I will not pretend this paper has all the answers. But I believe it asks the right questions, and I believe the evidence supports the case it makes. The IRC, in its full form, cannot be built by one organisation. It requires shared commitment across the system, from funders, universities, NHS bodies, local authorities, and community organisations, to test whether inclusive research can be held as a long-term responsibility rather than rebuilt from scratch with every new funding cycle.
An Invitation
This piece marks six months of Elysium London. It also marks a line in the sand.
I have spent six months learning, building, and developing a body of work that I believe can contribute to real change in how inclusive research is practised and sustained in South London. The white paper is part of that. So is the consultancy, the partnerships, and the work that sits behind them.
If any of this resonates with you, whether you are a commissioner, a researcher, a community leader, or someone working in this space who recognises the challenges I have described, I would welcome the conversation. Read the paper. Explore what Elysium London does. And if you see an opportunity to work together, get in touch.
The question I keep coming back to is simple. Are we willing to invest in infrastructure that holds inclusive research as a system responsibility, or will we keep rebuilding the same foundations every time a funding cycle ends?
I know where I stand. I would like to know where you do too.
Muhammed Rauf
Founder and Managing Director, Elysium London
muhammed@elysium.london | elysium.london