INCLUSIVE RESEARCH · POWER SHARED WITH COMMUNITIES
For institutions.
We help institutions share power with the communities their research affects. The commitments are already in your strategies and grant conditions; we work with the teams who have to make them hold, from a single study to a whole system.
Communities are meant to help shape the research that affects them. That expectation is in every funding call, every strategy, every brief. And still it does not hold. It breaks in delivery, when recruitment falls short, partnerships turn transactional, and the work stops the moment the funding does. Not for lack of trying. Because nothing is built to hold it.
That is where we work.
HOW WE WORK
One model, three functions.
Every level of this work runs through one model: The Inclusive Research Collaborative, a practitioner-led intermediary between institutions and communities. It holds the work together in three ways.
Authentic participation
The communities a study affects hold genuine influence over its questions, its decisions and its direction, not only its fieldwork.
Reciprocity
People give their time and knowledge, and knowledge, skills and opportunity flow back to them, beyond payment alone.
Lifecycle engagement
Inclusion runs from setting the question to sharing the findings, not one round of consultation.
Reflexive practice
We keep our own position and power in view, and help your team do the same.
01 / PROJECT
Get a single study right.
Most inclusive research commitments are made at grant stage. Delivery is where they come under pressure. This level is for that moment.
Inclusive commitments are made at grant stage and tested in delivery, and that is usually where they come under pressure: recruitment stalls, a community partnership turns transactional, or an ethics or funder question lands and cannot wait for the next round. We build a working session around the specific problem your team is facing, in the room or online, and work it through with them: what is going wrong, what good practice looks like here, and the concrete next steps to take. Your team leaves with a way through and methods they can use again.
- A session built around your live inclusion problem
- What good practice looks like, applied to your study
- Concrete next steps and methods your team keeps
Funders, ethics committees and external reviewers increasingly ask whether a study’s inclusion is real or only stated, and it is better to answer that yourselves than to have it answered for you. We assess your inclusion and engagement approach against published standards and the realities of delivery, and set out, in a report you can cite, what is working, where it is exposed, and what to do about it. It gives your team, and the people you answer to, an honest external read they can act on and defend.
- An independent assessment against published standards
- A clear read on what is working and what is exposed
- Recommendations, written to be cited and acted on
Inclusion is easiest to promise at grant stage and easiest to lose in delivery, when recruitment falls short, partnerships thin out, and the communities a study is for simply do not arrive. We work inside your study at exactly those points: shaping the design and sampling so the right people are reachable, building and holding the community partnerships that recruitment depends on, and keeping inclusion real through fieldwork rather than reported after the fact. The result is delivery that reaches who it should and stands up to review.
- Design and sampling that make the right people reachable
- Community partnerships built and held through delivery
- Delivery that reaches who it should and stands up to review
02 / PRACTICE
Change how your organisation does research.
One good project does not change an institution. Standards drift between studies. Knowledge leaves with staff. Community relationships dissolve when the funding ends, and the next team starts from scratch.
One good project does not change an institution. Standards drift between studies, good practice lives in a few people’s heads, and knowledge leaves when they do. We develop your researchers as a cohort, through a structured programme that builds inclusive research into how the team actually works, from fieldwork and community partnership to governance and reporting. We design it to make itself redundant: the aim is a team that holds the practice without us.
- A structured curriculum built around how your team works
- A trained cohort, not a one-off session
- Practice the team holds after we leave
Sometimes the need sits between a one-off session and a full curriculum: a live study or portfolio that needs focused, expert support, with evidence a funder will accept at the end. We start with a diagnostic of where inclusion is actually breaking down in the work, then provide applied support at those points as the work runs, and leave you with tools and an evidenced account of what changed. It is capability-building wrapped around real delivery, not a course running alongside it.
- A diagnostic of where inclusion is actually breaking
- Applied support at those points, as the work runs
- An inclusion toolkit and an evidenced account for funders
Some organisations need inclusion held at portfolio level: not a single project, but a standing hand on the standards, the community partnerships, and the governance questions that keep recurring across studies. We work alongside your leadership across the year as that steady point of expertise, on call for the decisions that matter and keeping inclusive practice coherent as studies, teams and funders change. It is the difference between inclusion depending on a few committed people and being held by the institution itself.
- A standing point of expertise across the year
- Standards, partnerships and governance held together
- Inclusion held by the institution, not a few people
03 / SYSTEM
Build the infrastructure itself.
The commitment to share power is everywhere. The infrastructure to hold it is not yet built. That is the work at this level.
We advise senior leaders on research strategy, governance and commissioning, and we build pilot collaborations that cross institutional lines. This is The Inclusive Research Collaborative from the model above, taken up as a partnership. System-level partners help decide what it becomes.
Work at this level takes shape between partners. It starts with a conversation.
Working in a community organisation?
Most partners start at project level. Everything we build there, the standards, the skills, the relationships, is designed to climb.
Tell us where your research is now. Every step here is one step towards health equity, built into the nation’s infrastructure.