We put communities most impacted by urgent global health challenges at the heart of what we do. The community engagement we support visibly and meaningfully involves those communities in Wellcome’s work to help enable collective change.
Community engagement plays a vital role in supporting science to solve urgent challenges and in creating mutual trust and acceptance across communities.
We aim to build connection, to prioritise local knowledge and expectations and to enable communities to play a meaningful role alongside health research.
To foster this relationship, we need to focus on:
From basic science to health challenge research, effective community engagement involves communities most likely to be affected by research outcomes in ways that prioritise their views and experiences. It encourages mutual trust and improves the scope, relevance and impact of research.
We’re working to advance the objectives of Wellcome’s strategy in each area outlined below. These include a broad programme of discovery research and a focus on the urgent health challenges of infectious disease, climate and health, and mental health.
Communities affected by health challenges play a central and active role in tackling them, and so we are prioritising the potential of this active community contribution alongside research.
Our goal is to influence ways that communities can play a role at different stages of Wellcome's work:
We’re creating better contextual understanding and early engagement to help decision-making around research priorities and amplifying the voice of communities most affected to key decision-makers.
We’re learning about how research works well with communities, through work on human-centred clinical trials and by supporting collective knowledge (for example, community-generated data to augment research).
We’re engaging communities in research uptake and outcomes to guide design of interventions of research and policies and to support sustained impact.
We're exploring how funding and other resources can support collective action towards Wellcome’s goals and ensure long-term sustainability. To do this, we work with a wide range of local partners and build sustainable relationships in key geographies. Our team holds the relationship to Community Engagement teams in our Africa and Asia programmes. We connect with other funders and global partners to join up investment, approaches and to improve the evidence base of community engagement.
Those facing the most disproportionate effects of the health challenges are often those who are least able to contribute to change, if not entirely excluded. Our work centres the voices of those most impacted. We believe that everyone is an expert based on their own lived experience, and everyone has unique contributions to bring to a change process. We look for what is already working at the community level and we work towards sustainable, community-led outcomes.
We recruit changemakers passionate about addressing health challenges posed by climate change. In our programme, they develop a deeper understanding of the climate and health intersection, while gaining skills, tools and relationships to achieve engagement and impact in their work.
Responsive Dialogues connects stakeholders in a community to discuss, debate and respond to evidence about drug-resistant infections, and to generate concrete practical steps to addressing it. We developed an adaptable guide to support its implementation in any country.
Centres for Exchange aims to support more effective and meaningful routes for knowledge exchange with diverse communities in the research ecosystem. We are seed funding organisations in South Africa, Kenya and India, alongside the development of a global learning network.
Participation Lead
Funding & Partnerships Lead
