Since early 2021, Collaborate and the British Science Association (BSA) have been working with communities through Ideas Fund, an equitable, relational programme that foregrounds partnerships between communities and researchers.
The work has evolved with infrastructure development in the four areas – Highlands & Islands, North West Northern Ireland, Hull and Oldham – moving beyond short-term grants to nurture the relationships and systems that create lasting change.
This blog is the fifth in the series exploring the work. Following our last blog in 2024, Building infrastructure to empower communities: Principles for a new approach to community research ethics, the IF infrastructure areas have continued to develop in tangible and distinct ways. In our previous posts, we explored the early stages of change, how areas were “following where the energy goes” and nurturing relationships, often in emergent and nonlinear ways. We reflected on how community-led research ecosystems were beginning to take shape, supported by time afforded to build trust, shared values and collective learning.
A year later, something notable is happening: what was once energy for change is now starting to be embedded as established infrastructure. While each approach remains shaped by local context, what’s becoming visible is a different kind of infrastructure, one made of relationships, trust, ethics and care.
This blog reflects on what’s grown across the IF infrastructure areas over the past year in Highlands & Islands (H&I), North West Northern Ireland (NWNI) and Hull. What threads have held? What has evolved? And how do these examples demonstrate different ways of redistributing power and rethinking ethical practice in research.
What’s emerging is a simple yet powerful insight: sustainable public engagement doesn’t come from scale, speed, or top-down strategies; it comes from investing in local ecosystems that enable people to relate, collaborate, and decide together.
The pace of trust is not a delay – it is the work
In the IF areas we spoke to, there’s a shared commitment to working at the speed of relationships. That means resisting the institutional drive for quick wins and instead creating the time and conditions for trust to form.
In the H&I, this approach was embodied in a two-year-long Co-Priority survey process around rural mental health and wellbeing, co-designed with a working group that included people with different lived experiences. The result was a survey with 60% respondents who had never previously taken part in research. That’s a meaningful outcome, and it happened through slower, thoughtful work on language, tone and accessibility. In their own words: “One of the key bits of infrastructure is just having the time and space to do good by values.”
The group have been continuing these ways of collaborating with St Andrews Students to develop a new platform for communities to explore the data, and are now planning to share the findings at the Network Gathering in November 2025.
In Hull, relational working has become the core methodology. Researchers and community members meet first as people, not roles, creating space for mutuality and co-production. “In slowing down, you can actually speed up,” one Hull team member shared. This captures how trust-based infrastructure creates the conditions for faster, deeper work in the long term. The infrastructure work is about weaving and connecting. There are many initiatives in the city and within the university, where the ethos of the IF is helping to shape participatory processes, where community voices are amplified and recognised as key to creating systems change and impact – by starting where communities are and with what they need. Initiatives funded by the Ideas Fund in Hull, such as Town Anywhere, brought together people from across the city, sectors and diverse experiences to envision what 2040 could be, which would enhance mental wellbeing for everyone to flourish with systems changed to do no harm. This will form the basis for developing a Participatory Collective in the city as part of the next phase, which will support this different way of working.
In NWNI, consistent engagement with university partners is shifting dynamics from consultation to representation. The community team has built relationships with key academics that are now enabling wider influence, from developing community benefits frameworks for campus expansion to shaping new ethics processes. What’s changing isn’t just who gets heard, but how decisions are made and relationships are built. They’re embedding a way of working that values people’s time, contributions and expertise.
Together, these examples challenge the notion that slowness is a barrier. They show that the pace of trust is not a delay; it’s the work.
Ethics as core practice, not just a compliance task
In our fourth blog, we raised the notion that ethics should move beyond compliance and become a living practice. Over the past year, this idea has developed in all three areas.
In NWNI, community partners are actively working with the university to redesign ethics processes for small-scale projects. A question that’s been raised is, “Why is the same process used for a £5k community project and a multimillion-pound grant?” It’s a conversation now being considered seriously, and it signals a shift in how institutions understand accountability.
In Hull, the team is naming the disconnect between institutional language and action. As described by the team, “People use the words, but the actual heart of it isn’t there.” What they’re calling for, and beginning to demonstrate, is an ethics rooted in care, lived experience and relational practice, rather than institutional compliance, focused on the language of risk, harm and vulnerabilities. The university funded the Hull IF team to convene some workshops, with an external facilitator, on how to design a more enabling ethics process, and community partners joined researchers to think through what this could look and feel like, to address the power imbalance of being researched ‘on’ to research ‘with’.
In H&I, a participatory ethics toolkit is being developed where communities can “set the terms” of how they want to be involved in research. The toolkit is developing slowly, with some piloting of the participatory game itself with youthwork practitioners earlier in the year, for example. This slowing down is intentional and reflects the team’s commitment to doing the work well by going at both the right pace for communities as well as for the team itself. The intention is clear: ethics isn’t an add-on, it’s part of the infrastructure they’re building, and working with an ethics of care is in itself a core value behind it all.
These are not isolated experiments but part of a wider sector priority, with ethics increasingly recognised as a critical issue for community-engaged research and knowledge exchange. We think these are signs of a cultural shift, one in which ethics becomes the connective tissue between people, not just paperwork between research stages.
Piloting new research ecosystems
Each IF area is now creating new institutional forms that can sustain this way of working beyond the life of the grant.
As mentioned previously, the new Participatory Collective cooperative in Hull is being established to bridge community expertise and formal institutions. Its goal isn’t to compete or critique, but to “be alongside”, a values-led infrastructure that supports participatory approaches long term.
In H&I, the ethos of “community knowledge matters” is becoming embedded within the organisation, Science Ceilidh itself, not just in their community researcher programmes but across their other programmes. They’re also beginning to influence conversations at national level, including work with the Scottish Government that isn’t just about helping communities speak to policymakers, but about shifting how policymakers understand and value different forms of community knowledge.
In NWNI, sustained relationship-building has enabled new frameworks and pathways to influence university practices, not by demanding power, but by consistently showing up, contributing and co-creating.
What connects all of these efforts is the shift from short-term project thinking to long-term ecosystem building. These aren’t just pockets of good practice; they are prototypes for a different way of doing research and engagement.
Looking ahead to what’s next
When the work on infrastructure funding began, the central hypothesis was: if we invest in local ecosystems, not just discrete projects, we might create more meaningful, sustainable public engagement.
What we’re seeing now is evidence of that hypothesis in action. Not just in what has been produced, but in how it has been built: through cultures of care, community-led ethics and infrastructure of trust. As the work continues to evolve, the question becomes: what will it take to carry these practices forward and embed them systematically? We’ll explore that in the next, and final, instalment of this blog series.
This blog is part five of a series. Read parts one, two, three and four:
Part one of this series – Beyond project funding: how can funders nurture healthy systems?
Part three of this series – Nurturing a healthy system: following where the energy goes
Part four of this series – Building infrastructure to empower communities: principles for a new approach to community research ethics