Shifting power to the communities that research is meant to serve.
The infrastructure between communities and institutions.
Where you live still shapes how well, and how long, you live.
Health in England follows a steep social gradient. The communities furthest from power carry the most illness, the earliest, with the fewest resources to meet it. These differences are structural, avoidable, and widening. Research helps decide what the country does about them: done with communities, it can shift power and resources towards the people who need them most; done at a distance, it widens the very gap it set out to close.
WHY WE EXIST
The commitment to share power is everywhere. The infrastructure to hold it is not yet built.
Across funders, universities, the NHS and integrated care systems, inclusive and community-centred research has moved from good intention to expectation, and, since 2024, to a condition of funding. Awareness is no longer the problem. Guidance is not in short supply either.
What is short is everything needed to deliver on the intent and keep it delivered: people with the practitioner skill to do the work well, relationships with communities that outlast a single study, standards that mean the same thing from one project to the next, and someone to hold all of it steady between funding cycles. Those functions tend to be rebuilt from scratch each time, then lost when the funding ends. Elysium London works in that gap.
The Inclusive Research Collaborative.
Inclusion is an expectation across research now, and still it stays fragile and project-bound. The same four patterns recur. Funding, ethics and procurement reward institutional fluency over closeness to communities. No one holds responsibility for inclusion across projects, so relationships and learning vanish when people move on. Standards vary so widely that partnership and extraction travel under the same name. And communities are brought in to be seen rather than to decide.
The Inclusive Research Collaborative is our response: a practitioner-led intermediary that keeps inclusive research a standing function of the system, rather than a task rebuilt from scratch on every project. It belongs to neither institutions nor communities. It does not replace what either already has. It connects them, and holds the standards, relationships and learning that no single organisation is mandated to carry.
It shifts power to communities by holding what a single project cannot: the standards, the relationships, and the learning that is lost each time funding cycles end. The foundations are going in now, through commissioned training, advisory work and early research collaborations, and every engagement builds the model.
OUR VISION
Health equity, built into the nation's infrastructure.
We shift power in research by building the standards, skills and relationships that hold when the funding ends.
THE FOUNDER
As a Pakistani Muslim, I learned early that the system was not built for people like me.
Growing up in Lambeth, racism, discrimination and inequality were part of my everyday experience: a struggle, rooted in race and culture, that makes you question your own identity. That same struggle builds a particular strength and resilience. It connected me to people who, in overcoming these experiences, created their own answers to the problems their communities faced, building thriving local economies without institutional investment, support or recognition. It was where I first experienced what the sector now calls community power.
In 2020, during the pandemic, I became a community researcher and began to see these problems through a new lens. For too long, people like me had been excluded from research, the very process that decides what is done to improve our lives. Our experiences had been extracted to produce knowledge about us, without us, leaving us to hope for a better tomorrow without the chance to shape what it looks like.
Since then I have dedicated myself to shifting that paradigm, so that communities lead research from design to delivery to dissemination, in a way that builds community power into change that lasts. What I kept running into was not a lack of will. It was a ceiling on even the most impactful work: the systems and processes that govern research, the infrastructure of how the sector operates.
So I started Elysium London with one aim, to build the infrastructure that works, for the people who need it most. That is what we are building: the infrastructure for inclusive and community-centred research.
Two directions, one principle.
With institutions, we help open their research to the communities it affects, so the power over questions, methods and decisions is genuinely shared. With communities, we help build and lead research they own outright. The principle underneath both is the same: the people a study is about help author it, and hold real power over what it asks and decides, which is why our work runs across the whole of it rather than a single round of consultation.
The line we hold
In both, communities are authors of the research, not a source of data for it. A seat in the room is not a hand on the decision. It is why our work runs across the whole project, not a single moment of consultation, and why we answer to communities and institutions alike.
Will you build it with us?
If your work points at the same outcome, we would like to do it alongside you. It usually starts with a conversation.