We brought all our Evidence Building Grant partners together in June this year - these are some of our reflections on the deepening conversations and connections.
Our Evidence Building grants were intended to support groups to really make the most of their learning, take their work to the next level of impact or reach, and help us reflect on some of the core conditions for supporting community-led collaboration with research. Since 2024 they’ve been doing just that – building on the work they’ve begun, developing a deep understanding of what’s working and why. In early June we brought together all our Evidence Building grant projects, to spend two days together sharing, learning and connecting.
We began with a provocation from Darren from OUT, one of our funded partners, about how we can “measure the unmeasurable” - the sense that there are things happening in our work which aren't easily quantifiable or captured but which are profoundly important.
There followed different discussions about what we’re seeing in our work, and a collective sense that perhaps nothing is unmeasurable, only dismissed by systems that don’t value impacts such as reduced shame, growth in confidence or a newfound ability to speak up.
We spent time talking about creative methods, peer research and values in research – from which emerged similar themes around the importance of trusting relationships, flexibility, emergence, and co-creation as cornerstones for ethical, authentic research. The importance of moving from reflection to sharing more widely was present across all our discussions.
As ever, the value of our time together is not just in the richness of the conversation and the insights shared by this group of people which such deep expertise, but in the relationships (and in so many places, the friendships) being formed and strengthened. We spoke about a system which needed change, the allies we know across other organisations, and an intention to strengthen a movement which reimagines research. We’ll have more to share on this in the coming months.
For now, we’ll end in the same way as our collectively penned poem – what if everything changed?
What are the Evidence Building Grants?
Twelve Ideas Fund projects from four areas of the UK are midway through a three year journey to deepen their impact and capture their learning.
Click here to read more about these projects