Any strategy that requires new ways of working demands a new kind of supportive infrastructure to sustain it. Without that infrastructure, a great pilot or prototype will remain just that.
After working to support innovation and entrepreneurship for more than two decades, I’ve seen 1,001 great ideas that people talk about, point at, and pour praise over – only to have their heads turned to something else that captures their imagination. Alongside this, those new ideas find that incumbent systems of organisation, governance and accountability are resistant to the change. And, too often, the gravitational pull of the status quo spins great ideas out of orbit, leaving us the same challenges as before, forever unresolved.
I don’t expect the current attraction towards community-led and community involving research to be a flash in the pan. There are too many people now recognising the value and impact of a much more locally-rooted, engaged approach to research that has the power to translate into action and social innovation through wider participation from those outside academia.
But as the evidence base accrues, so too does the need to think seriously about the infrastructure that can support this complex, sometimes messy, participatory and inherently social approach to research.
The Young Foundation has been incredibly fortunate to work closely with UKRI to deliver and invest in the Community Knowledge Fund and Community Research Networks – each demonstrating the ways in which people can use research as a springboard into locally-rooted action and change. They are pilot programmes and funds, demonstrating what community-led research can look and feel like in practice.
If we want those programmes to evolve into sustained infrastructure for this kind of work, five things demand our attention:
ONE: A tangible vision
Where do we want to get to? What does an equitable future for research and innovation across the UK look like? In the specific context of ‘infrastructure’ it’s helpful to use an analogy: just as motorways connect big cities in the UK, so too does research and innovation investment flow into our big institutions – with occasional bypasses into Independent Research Organisations (IROs). The UK’s A roads, B roads, and unadopted roads lead to different places outside those big conurbations. In the same vein, a more expansive and community-involving research and innovation infrastructure needs arterial routes into places it has not reached before. And just as A and B roads don’t just disappear after a quick foray, the same needs to be true of community research infrastructure. They require maintenance and investment.
TWO: Investment
Yes, yes, here is the familiar cry that something requires long-term investment to be sustained. Unfortunately, we can’t get away from that reality. It’s a testament to UKRI that the Community Research Networks are being funded for five years – a decent runway to build real momentum, agency and impact. But the years go by quickly. What then?
As well as considering a sustained funding settlement (perhaps akin – but different to – the Arts Council model for funding NPOs) the ‘how’ of funding community research is just as important. For example, funding collectives and networks will foster cross-community and cross-sector collaboration, and minimise unhelpful competition. It demands that funders value the priorities and patterns of organisation with communities, not just academic outputs. It requires us to recognise that where research capabilities are low, investment has, likely, historically not flowed and therefore may be more necessary – and require a slightly different approach to risk. An engaged intermediary funder, such as The Young Foundation does much to minimise this ‘risk’ through a more relational approach to fund management.
THREE: Leadership
Leadership is an activity, not a position. Leadership is not about being a hero but rather cultivating a distributed sense of leadership across a network, organisation or place. Whether working on place-based change in Luton, supporting innovation in the heritage sector or through the Community Leadership Academy, The Young Foundation embeds leadership development across many of our projects, rooted in adaptive1 and distributed2 leadership theories and Action Inquiry3.
Leading across complex and contested landscapes requires a mindset shift alongside a shift in practice. And that is as true for those working in institutions as it is in communities. Creating the infrastructure for emerging leaders in community-led research (whether they emerge within or beyond organisational boundaries) to develop non-cognitive competencies is fundamental to delivering this work well, and builds the capacity for community-led research in ways that can be sustained.
FOUR: Learning infrastructure
This learning infrastructure for community-led research is not just about pathways to accessing and mobilising the knowledge and evidence gained. It is not only about the outputs and outcomes it generates, but learning about the process by which those outcomes are achieved. It’s about learning the practice of community research – the ethics and safeguarding that underpins it, the power dynamics it upends (and sometimes can recreate, unwittingly). It’s about cultivating the art of true inclusion; the pitfalls, the enablers, and so on. Through sharing this learning in lateral ways across practitioners, communities and commissioners, we begin to build our collective competencies for the work. Competencies that should be collectively understood, honed and underpinned by standards and principles of practice.
The team at The Young Foundation know that not all community-led and community-engaging research is done well, inclusively or ethically. Building and sustaining the infrastructure for enabling the exchange of learning and experiences is a great guard against poor practice – which can not only leave non-academic researchers bruised (if not harmed) but also serves to undermine the wider case for its importance and value. The more heightened the attention to continuous learning, the more effective any lasting community research infrastructure will be.
FIVE: Institutional and policy alignment
Institutional and policy alignment is essential to embedding community-led research within mainstream research and innovation infrastructure. This is a much longer game, and requires academic and government systems to formally recognise and reward the value of community-driven inquiry. This involves reforming research ethics processes to better accommodate participatory and community-led approaches, setting expectations for equitable data ownership and governance, and revising assessment frameworks to acknowledging community impact as a valid and important research output. It remains the case that the incentives for academia are primarily skewed towards publications and citations. And impact in social research often focused on policy influencing. These are not bad incentives, but they are not complete – and sometimes highly limiting to achieving sustained, meaningful outcomes for the communities the research is intended to serve.
Taken together, these five foundations for community research infrastructure may not be complete, but they may do much to reduce the risk of community research being seen as a fleeting fashion or fad, before we get back to the business of doing ‘real research’.
What a wasted opportunity that would be.
Read our new report on partnership working to support community participatory across research
Community Methods and measurement Systems change Posted on: 14 August 2025 Authors: Helen Goulden OBE,