Advancing Engaged Health Research

Project Overview

Health research has long struggled with a fundamental imbalance: the people most affected by health inequities are often the least involved in shaping the research intended to address them.Community engagement has increasingly been recognised as an important response to this problem. Yet engagement activities alone do not necessarily shift who defines research questions, whose knowledge counts, or how power operates within research relationships.

Engaged research is an approach that seeks to address this imbalance by ensuring that research is shaped in partnership with the people and communities it aims to serve. Rather than treating engagement as an add-on activity, engaged research asks how participation, shared decision-making, and accountability can be embedded throughout the research lifecycle: from defining priorities and shaping methods to interpreting findings and translating knowledge into action.

To support this shift, Wellcome Trust commissioned a collaborative project to consolidate learning from across the field of engaged research and develop a resource that could support researchers to strengthen participatory and equitable approaches in their own work. The goal was not to produce another toolkit, but to create a structured learning resource grounded in the realities of research practice and informed by the perspectives of researchers, engagement practitioners, and community partners working across multiple contexts.

Our Role

This work was carried out through a partnership between Vocal Collective, Pivot Collective, and Mabadiliko. Together, the partners designed and facilitated a year-long developmental learning process to explore how engaged research is currently understood, practiced, and supported across different research contexts. The process combined stakeholder interviews, collaborative sense-making workshops, and a structured review of existing frameworks and approaches to engaged research.

These insights informed the development of Purpose, Power, Practice: A Primer for Engaged Research, commissioned by Wellcome as a resource to support researchers seeking to integrate engaged approaches across the research lifecycle.

The Primer is organised around four interconnected pathways:

WHY? – exploring the ethical and practical foundations for engaged research WITH WHOM? – identifying and building equitable research partnerships HOW? – designing and implementing engaged approaches across the research lifecycle SO WHAT? – understanding and evaluating the impacts of engaged research

We are currently working with Wellcome teams to help integrate project insights into how the organisation supports researchers and designs funding approaches that enable more engaged research practices. Building on this work, we're also exploring a potential second phase that will expand the focus from supporting individual researchers to examining how research institutions and funding systems can better enable engaged research.

What We're Learning

One of the clearest insights from this collaboration is that engaged research cannot be reduced to a checklist or toolkit. Many engagement resources already exist, yet researchers consistently emphasised that what they really needed was support in navigating the deeper relational, ethical, and practical challenges of working collaboratively.

Engaged research requires researchers to develop new capacities, including reflexive practice, relational skills, and the ability to share power within research partnerships. Meaningful collaboration takes time, trust-building, and openness to uncertainty. At the same time, this work cannot be carried by individual researchers alone. Engaged research is inherently collective, requiring shared commitment across research teams, community partners, institutions, and funders to create the conditions for genuine collaboration.

The learning process also reinforced the importance of starting with purpose. Rather than asking first how to do engagement, researchers must begin by asking why: why engagement matters in a particular context, whose knowledge is needed, and what responsibilities research carries toward the communities it seeks to serve. The Primer therefore begins with a section called Starting with Self, encouraging researchers to reflect on their own positionality, assumptions, and power before designing engagement processes, while recognising that meaningful engagement ultimately unfolds through relationships and partnerships.

These insights shaped the design of the Primer itself. Instead of offering prescriptive steps, the resource is structured as a reflective learning guide that supports researchers to think through questions of purpose, partnership, practice, and impact, helping them build more thoughtful, accountable, and collaborative approaches to research.