Twelve Months In: Building the Inclusive Research Infrastructure to Shift Power

The commitment to share power is everywhere. The infrastructure to hold it isn’t built.

Twelve months of Elysium London, an inclusive and community-centred research practice. What the year taught me, what I’m building next, and how to be part of it.

Where this comes from

For too long, people like me have been excluded from research, and decisions about our lives continue to be made about us without us.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I became a Community Researcher in a department at The Social Innovation Partnership (TSIP) that became Centric Community Research. From Community Researcher to Head of Business Development and then Director, I helped build a grassroots organisation from the ground up, and create the change I wanted to see where I grew up in South London.

We worked with marginalised communities in Lambeth and Southwark, then parts of West London, then Ghana and the Dominican Republic. In 2023 we were invited to deliver a plenary talk at the NIHR Implementation Science Conference, on the model we had built and the impact it had.

The model was this. Bringing together community knowledge with academic rigour, to build the capability of communities to lead research on the issues that affected them, from start to finish. Shifting the paradigms of how research in this country gets done. By the community, for the community.

For me, it was more than an organisation. It was a social movement to tackle inequality, discrimination and racism through research.

While the model was recognised and the work reached people well beyond where it started, it was not without its challenges.

Centric was navigating a sector with systems designed to hold power, not share it. A sector that claims to value community knowledge and experience, but continues to under-resource it. And in that space, the Interspace as I call it, I was constantly pulled between community realities and aspirations, and institutional systems and priorities. I learned how hard it is to change a system. And how easy it can be to be changed by it instead.

When it came time to leave Centric as we moved into 2025, I was deeply proud of all we had achieved as a team. But I knew our work was not finished. And this left me with a question only I could answer: does my work stop here?

Launching Elysium London in late September that year was my answer. A new organisation with a new approach, but a continuation of the mission I’d started five years earlier. To shift power into the hands of communities to make the decisions that affect them. To build the solutions to the problems I had experienced that can outlast a funding cycle.

The Interspace Framework is set out in full in my first white paper, Strategic Frameworks for Inclusive Research.

Publishing the diagnosis

In March this year, I published my second white paper, The Inclusive Research Collaborative: An Evidence-based Case for New Infrastructure in South London. It captures the patterns I’d drawn together from those experiences, from what sector leaders shared with me, and from what national funders and the published literature have evidenced. Four patterns many of you will recognise:

1. Processes that reward familiarity with institutional language and systems rather than closeness to the communities who are most in need.
2. Nobody owns inclusion. It sits across engagement, EDI, research offices and programme leads. When the person holding the relationship leaves, the learning goes with them, and the next project asks the same community the same questions again.
3. No shared sector standard for language and models that relate to describing inclusive or community research. Hence communities can experience either extractive practices or power-sharing practices under the same branding.
4. Tokenistic inclusion of communities in research. Communities are brought into projects to be seen, but not heard, and lack genuine influence over decision-making.

We must recognise our own role in perpetuating some of the negative aspects of research culture and work to rebalance the distribution of power, money, and resources we have as funders

Impact on Urban Health and Wellcome, Shifting the power in research, a four-year, £3 million partnership in Lambeth and Southwark, to 2025

If the funders said to me that I have to dress in orange, I would dress in orange.

A researcher at the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, quoted in Research Involvement and Engagement, 2026

That is the title of a paper published this year in Research Involvement and Engagement, taken from one of the researchers interviewed for it. Based on interviews at the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, it describes a model of involvement that is “unreflective” and “box-ticking”, and the authors note that researchers’ concerns have changed little over the past sixteen years.

National infrastructure has been built to address these structural barriers before, and rebuilt through successive cycles. Bodies such as the Applied Research Collaborations were meant to address these patterns locally, but sat inside universities and carried the same incentives and funding cycles that worked against them. ARC South London closed in March 2026, and the relationships it held closed with it. The NIHR funding call sets out what replaces it: a single pan-London ARC, £22 million to March 2031, on a contract running from July 2026. That is the cycle turning again.

The paper sets out the full argument, written from the perspective of South London. Since then it has extended further, in conversations, workshops and training with those working in universities and the NHS, and with community members and voluntary and community organisations. The patterns resonated, and people saw their own experience reflected back with a name for it. Five years in, what started as my diagnosis has become a shared one.

Designing the solution

Once you understand and name the problems, you must begin to design the solution. Or you might find the solution is designed for you.

The Inclusive Research Collaborative (IRC) is a practitioner-led intermediary. Institutions commission, fund and govern research. Communities hold the knowledge that research needs. The IRC sits between them, shifts power to communities, and does the work of connecting them that no single organisation is resourced to carry. It does that through three functions:

Institutions Commission, fund and govern Universities · NHS trusts and integrated care systems · Local authorities · Funders

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The Inclusive Research Collaborative A practitioner-led intermediary

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Communities Where the knowledge lives Voluntary and community organisations · Civic and faith groups · Community researchers · Residents

Stewardship Standards that last

A minimum set of standards for inclusive and community-centred research, and a fixed point of continuity for the relationships with communities, kept up over time.

Translation Insight carried both ways

Community insight into institutional decisions, and institutional constraints back to communities, so both sides act on the same understanding.

Capability-building Skills that outlast the project

The training, the tools and the methods that partners keep using long after the funding ends.

Infrastructure that enables community power, built by the people and for the people.

Building the IRC is my commitment to the people trying to do this properly without the infrastructure to do it with, and to the communities I have grown up with, who still face the harsh realities of inequality day to day.

The mission to shift power in research is not new to this sector, and it is not mine alone. What I am building is part of the solution, and it sits within a much larger ecosystem of people and organisations who have already invested years in this work, and who had the courage to speak out while others stayed quiet.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Frederick Douglass, Canandaigua, New York, August 1857

The first year of building it

The Inclusive Research Collaborative gets built in stages, and everything below is the model being delivered in practice. It’s self-funded, and it will be shaped by the people and organisations who take part.

The Interspace Series is the first way to get involved, and it starts on Wednesday 11th November. Register your interest below and tell me what you’d like to see.

If you’ve been asking the same questions I have, or maybe you’re already working on the answer, this is for you.

The first session is on 11th November. Join us to learn more.

Muhammed Rauf
Founder and Managing Director, Elysium London
muhammed@elysium.london | elysium.london

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