Collaborate was commissioned by the BSA as learning and evidence-building partner to design and support an inclusive, relational and community-centred learning journey for the final four years of the Ideas Fund.

The Backdrop

Bringing together community power and insight and the power of research offers significant opportunities to unlock real impact in people’s day to day lives. But too often, the community’s experience of working with researchers is extractive and hierarchical, failing to deliver on its potential and in some cases, causing real harm. Opportunities to disrupt these traditional dynamics and find more effective opportunities for collaboration are very exciting to us, and we’ve been delighted to explore and learn about this with a long-term partner. 

The British Science Association (BSA) has been funded by Wellcome since 2021 to deliver The Ideas Fund, a groundbreaking community research fund which seeks to shift power to communities through putting funds in their hands to design and deliver collaborative projects with the support of a researcher.

In the early stages of the fund, Collaborate CIC supported the BSA to explore how to intervene for more systemic change alongside project funding, identifying the indicators of a healthy public engagement system and holding learning spaces for those involved in this ‘infrastructure’ building work.  

In 2023, Collaborate was commissioned as learning and evidence-building partner to design and support an inclusive, relational and community-centred learning journey for the final four years of the Ideas Fund.

What we’re doing

We began our work with a participative design process to co-produce an Impact Framework for the IF network, providing a unifying structure for guiding and bringing together learning across the programme. The impact framework captures potential impacts of the fund at multiple levels and for for different types of stakeholders in four key domains, while keeping communities at the centre. 

We then created a Learning, Evidence Building and Practice Sharing Strategy alongside the team, to enable purposeful attention to learning across the IF network. This was created with input from the core IF team, Development Coordinators and IF projects through an iterative process to ensure shared ownership and successful implementation of the approaches.

The strategy includes key learning questions as well as a clear structure and rhythm for ongoing learning, while still enabling space for emergence and re-prioritisation over the multi-year period. Through regular reflective sessions with the core team we support and coach those close to the work to step back from the day to day and reflect, helping them to notice and capture what they’re learning, and what to do with this insight to plan their next actions, problem solve or affect change in the wider system. A regular rhythm of learning cycles, each following a similar pattern but with a deep-dive into a specific topic, brings multiple perspectives and voices together to purposefully inquire into a particular question, collectively sensemake the learning and then produce something to share and communicate that learning. 

Alongside these key elements, we continue to flex our approach, stepping further into some areas and back from others, as the team requires and helping to hold them accountable to their overall ambitions while bringing practical tools and support along the way.

Impact and Learning

Our impact in this work has been about bringing structure, focus and support to enable learning in a complex and fast moving environment, where creating space for meaningful reflection can often be challenging. By holding inclusive, curious and relational spaces for colleagues at the BSA and beyond with whom we have built long and trusting relationships, we have helped to surface and capture important learning which may otherwise have been lost in the day to day.

We’ve also learned to balance this structure with emergence, working closely with the team to evaluate our plans and courses of action and making changes where needed to adapt to new information and opportunities and changing circumstances. 

We’ve offered solidarity and support through an experimental process, building collective confidence to continue pushing the boundaries of funding practice and to live by the principles that underline the project – and have learned so much ourselves about what it means to really enact a relational and powershifting way of working as a funder by working with this incredible team. 

We’re delighted to play a part in supporting the BSA team to capture and share valuable outputs about how the Ideas Fund has worked and its impact, including things like the Role of the Broker report. We are confident that these will have an important impact on others working in this space, clearly setting out a different way of working and practical tips for those who are new to community research and offering solidarity and acknowledgement to those who are already pushing for these ways of working. Many more such resources are in the pipeline and we encourage you to keep an eye on our comms and those of the Ideas Fund to see the latest outputs. 

Collaborate have added huge value to The Ideas Fund, bringing their authoritative voice on systems thinking, and approaches to learning, to strengthen our wider impact. They are always considered in how they work with our immediate and wider team, as well as our funded projects, and build strong relationships across the programme. They have helped us to bring focus, as well as flexibility, in how we work, and made a significant contribution to a number of creative outputs which are gaining traction across the [R&I] sector.

Chris Manion, British Science Association (BSA)