How we work
Global health and development systems often reproduce unequal power dynamics, privileging certain forms of knowledge, voices, and ways of working. Too often, those most affected by injustice are excluded from defining the questions and shaping the solutions. Our theory of change is simple: when knowledge is co-created, power is shared, and those most affected by injustice lead the way, more just and sustainable systems take root.
A more just and sustainable future takes shape when communities most affected by systemic injustice define the questions, influence decisions, and transform the systems that impact their lives.
In such a future
We work at multiple levels, from grassroots groups to global institutions, to reimagine the systems through which knowledge is produced, shared, and used for justice.
We understand change as both outcome and practice. The ways knowledge is created, relationships are built, and decisions are made shape the integrity and sustainability of the outcomes themselves. When communities co-lead research, when institutions pause to reflect critically, and when diverse forms of knowledge come into conversation, transformation is already underway.
Our hybrid structure enables us to support both community-led action and institutional transformation, connecting lived experience with strategy, policy, and systems change.
We work along three interconnected pathways to advance systemic change:
We work alongside grassroots organisations, young changemakers, and lived experience experts to design and implement participatory research, storytelling, and learning processes. These processes surface deeply rooted community knowledge and support people to define priorities and take action on what matters most to them.
We create spaces for communities, researchers, and decision-makers to share knowledge, build relationships, and co-create solutions. Through creative and accessible knowledge translation, we work to ensure that learning leads to action. By strengthening networks and enabling open knowledge exchange, we help ensure that community-grounded knowledge shapes research, policy, and practice and strengthens systems of care, accountability, and justice.
We partner with funders, NGOs, and policy actors to co-create more equitable strategies, partnerships, and systems. Through co-creative processes, strategic facilitation, and long-term learning partnerships, we help institutions critically examine their practices and reimagine how they share power and accountability.
Our work is grounded in a shared commitment to shifting entrenched hierarchies of knowledge and power in global and local health and development, where particular voices are privileged and others silenced. We believe this begins with how we work: within our own organisations, with partners, and through every aspect of our projects. This ethos of equity, care, and collaboration is reflected in the commitments that guide our day-to-day practice.
These principles guide how we work, every day, with each other and our partners:
We ground all of our work in a commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion. We draw on feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial principles to guide how we collaborate, make decisions, and share power. These values shape not only what we work on, but how we work: with care, humility, and mutual accountability.
We strive to shift power, foster collective understanding, and support cycles of evidence to actions that are grounded in collaboration and curiosity. We support each other to stay accountable to our core values across our projects. Living these values requires sustained attention to both process and outcomes in our relationships, decision-making, and project implementation.
We believe meaningful change happens through partnerships grounded in trust, mutual accountability, and shared purpose. We co-create with communities, collaborators, and institutions to shift decision-making power, centering lived experience, building collective agendas, and moving from knowledge to action. These partnerships are grounded in ongoing reflection, shared learning, and mutual accountability.
Our partnerships are also spaces to challenge assumptions, examine power, and reimagine whose knowledge counts. Through collaborative research, pedagogy, and strategy work, we help make visible how power shapes evidence, policy, and practice, and support more inclusive, critical, and justice-oriented ways of working.
We believe that all people have the right to contribute to knowledge and that those most affected by injustice must shape how problems are understood and addressed. At the heart of this is a commitment to epistemic justice: the principle that knowledge should serve justice by valuing diverse ways of knowing and redistributing who gets to define, use, and benefit from knowledge.
We honour different ways of knowing (including academic, lived, creative, and practical) and build inclusive processes for mutual learning, shared authorship, and collective meaning-making. We challenge hierarchies that exclude or devalue lived experience and work to ensure that marginalised forms of knowledge inform the systems, narratives, and strategies that shape people's lives.
We believe that shifting power begins with how we show up — for one another, for our partners, and for the people and communities we work with. Care is not an add-on to our work; it is a political and practical commitment. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, we intentionally nurture relationships rooted in empathy, trust, and reciprocity. Care is also a strategy for power redistribution, supporting people to show up fully and equitably in spaces often shaped by exclusion.
This commitment shows up in how we design spaces that acknowledge trauma, difference, and interdependence. We prioritise practices that support individual and collective wellbeing, while holding space for complexity and contradiction. Through our projects, partnerships, and internal culture, we aim to cultivate communities of care that sustain collective work and enable deeper, more equitable collaboration.
We approach our work with curiosity and humility, recognising that lasting change requires mutual accountability, reflection, creativity, and a willingness to shift course. As learning partners, we help others adapt to complexity through co-inquiry, collaborative problem-solving, and participatory innovation.
We listen deeply, stay open to the unexpected, and continually question our own assumptions. We recognise that learning requires examining our own positionality and role in shaping systems of power. For us, learning is not a linear process. It is a dynamic and relational practice that invites experimentation, imagination, and the courage to be changed by what we learn. We aim to translate insight into action through co-created strategies that support justice, care, and long-term change.
