Those seeking to meaningfully and equitably engage people with lived experience of their research matter face a range of difficult questions that fundamentally shapes the direction of their research. Do you need to compensate community members for their contribution to the research? If so, how much is considered fair? At what point do you introduce them into the process? Were the research objectives decided in co-production with the community? Have you asked the community what they hope to get out of this research? And how do you plan to accredit them for their part in the process? Most importantly, do you intend to maintain a meaningful relationship with the community to create long-term impact, or do you cease contact once your paper is published?

Black South West Network (BSWN) is a Black-led racial justice organisation with over seven years of experience exploring these questions. Its work aims to disrupt traditional research methodologies and practices to locate Black and Minoritised communities at the heart of knowledge production. In 2024, all the years of learning were compiled into the Charter for Anti-Racist Co-production, published in partnership with the University of Bristol, with the objective to provide research institutions, funders and community organisations with clear steps to co-produce research equitably and through an anti-racist lens.

In the Charter and beyond, we have collated evidence of lived experiences from Black and Minoritised community individuals and organisations and Black scholars based in the Global South as well as in UK institutions, who have personally experienced and tested the limitations of engaging communities with traditional research practices. This is particularly relevant when the research interests are focused on groups who have experienced disproportionate systemic disadvantage for decades, and therefore have developed lower levels of trust in mainstream provision and institutions.

The Charter starts at the root causes of the problem:

1. Firstly, the unequal distribution of authority and resources in the current research system. Most research funding opportunities can only be accessed by community organisations as a third party via research institutions, and the majority of funding and positions of authority in the project are allocated to academic researchers only. This environment inherently creates a hierarchy of knowledge and roles where communities often find themselves at the bottom of the scale.
2. The lack of transparency and accountability is another unintended consequence of the system described above. Community organisations are often provided with filtered, incomplete and unclear information about the research objectives and funding allocation choices. Most importantly, community organisations are rarely credited or mentioned at all in the final project outputs, even when their own lived experiences are the original data source of the research project.

In response to these challenges, the Charter proposes the following principles of good practice:

1. Encouraging autonomy of communities in research co-production through an equitable redistribution of resources and authority, and in doing so valuing the perspectives and knowledge of Black and Minoritised communities, who can often provide specialised expertise on their own alternative community-based methodologies and engagement practices.
2. Maintaining research integrity through the active inclusion of Black and Minoritised community partners along the entire cycle of the research co-production process and beyond. This is especially crucial in the after-project phase, where the outcomes are celebrated and the newly built knowledge should produce actionable solutions. In fact, most of these solutions are impossible to be put into practice without the direct involvement of the community members.

Whilst the practical guidelines and examples we provided in the Charter toolkit can be adjusted to fit specific contexts – whether you’re a funding body, an institution, a charity, or a community member collaborating on research – these two key principles of the Charter are non-negotiable. This essay aims to provide concrete examples of the Charter’s principles in action. 

Funders and radical changes to funding practices

Funders play a key role in addressing unequal access to resources for community-centred research. As an example, researchers may face challenges in co-producing equitable, anti-racist research due to strict funding deadlines and the inability to pay community members - often categorised as the general public - for their valued input. This is an issue, and an entire system, that can only be addressed by the funders themselves. 

Our Charter calls for going beyond an inflexible application of deadlines to build in reasonable time for creating genuine partnerships and negotiating mutually beneficial co-production agreements between research institutions and community partners. Meaningful co-production inevitably takes time, due to the need to involve numerous voices and perspectives from community practitioners who are often busy delivering frontline immediate support to communities.

An example of this good practice is given by the UKRI-funded Community Research Networks programme, which allocated resources for a 12-month development phase for the creation of a meaningful cross-sectoral partnership and the co-production of commonly agreed project outcomes, before releasing the project’s implementation fund and kickstarting the delivery. 

This funding model also stipulated rules for avoiding disproportionate levels of authority being allocated to academic institutions and actively levelled the playing field for community partners to take an active role in the shaping of research objectives and ambitions. 

Generally, the funders demonstrated high levels of responsiveness and a willingness to adapt their funding processes to meet the unique needs of community organisations. For example, after community organisations requested the opportunity to supplement their written funding application with other forms of expressions such as diagrams and video testimonials, UKRI welcomed the option to integrate submission with audio-visual responses – alleviating much of the stress that comes with only expressing one’s practical work, ideals and impact in writing. This approach shows openness to innovation and to adaptation in order to create a more inclusive research funding environment. 

Another example is given by The Phoenix Way Initiative, a radically pioneering funding model that funds community organisations directly to increase the community sector’s overall capacity to engage with research, innovation and policy-influencing opportunities. The national initiative ultimately aims to build the infrastructure and capacity needed for the racial justice community sector to reach financial sustainability in the long-term and open space and opportunities for each organisation to meaningfully contribute to civic engagement.

The commonly shared trait among these approaches is the investment funders have made in building a more relational and less transactional connection with the community sector and its members, recognising how communities - and particularly those facing systemic disadvantage - have historically been excluded from the formal research system. Furthermore, in providing flexibility, resources and time, funders are also demonstrating growing trust in the potential that communities have to contribute to, build on, and lead on in the creation of knowledge, and ultimately claim their rightful place as part of the overall research system, not as a third party but as a main actor.

Universities and research institutions

The Charter provides background information to the complexity of engaging with Black and Racially Minoritised communities whilst representing institutions who have a historical colonial past and current power hierarchies, which can easily hinder the genuine creation of equitable partnerships, especially with individuals facing intersectional dimensions of socio-economic and racial disadvantage.

Black scholars - both in the Global South and in UK institutions - have provided evidence of lived experience in attempting to implement this delicate process whilst belonging to both the community and the academic space, and they have highlighted the contradictions and tensions within it. Our research shows that whilst these scholars are advancing the discourse for transformative change to happen, institutions as a whole need to declare commitment to changing their civic engagement practices and becoming openly anti-racist.

The University of Bristol itself demonstrates this in action. Their continued involvement in working with Black South West Network and its community partners shows a willingness to let the community lead, acknowledging the historic contributions the University made in fostering systemic oppression, and willingness to take action against it. 

Indeed, The Brigstow Institute - a funding body housed within the University of Bristol that is primarily focused on promoting co-produced approaches to research - stated that the principles of the Charter will be integrated into the Institute’s grant funding application process. In doing so, researchers who receive funding will be obliged to adhere with the principles of equity and anti-racism put forward in the document. 

Since the Charter publication, the interest from higher education institutions in the South West region and beyond has been rewardingly high. Academics from all disciplines and from all levels of seniority have declared their openness and interest to learn from the Charter’s toolkit and its collaborators’ experiences.

Communities

Communities can use the Charter in many different ways. One example that shows the Charter in action is the UnMuseum Project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to explore possibilities for radical, community-owned cultural heritage archives. The project takes the Charter toolkit recommendation 7 and puts it into practice: 

“[To build] long-term community capacity for Black and Minoritised people’s meaningful involvement in research as well as for building their autonomy in independent community-led knowledge-production and archiving.”

This recommendation has two parts. First, it focuses on capacity-building, urging partners to help communities become self-sufficient. For the UnMuseum, this means providing resources like funding guidance, technology, and research data and software access. Second, it emphasises community autonomy – ensuring that communities not only have resources but also control over how they use them. Partners must support truly independent communities capable of leading their own research, archiving, and operations if they are to see sustainable co-production and anti-racist research practices.  

Communities, in turn, must take the initiative to lead, delegate, and apply their own methods in line with the Charter’s principles, particularly those encouraging leadership and self-advocacy. The UnMuseum seeks to disrupt traditional museum approach by partnering with, and letting lead, Black and Minoritised communities in the South West to create new archiving approaches they deem proper. This includes exploring a community-shared intellectual property model, ensuring that those who provide stories and artefacts retain autonomy and ownership over their knowledge and histories. Moreover, the UnMuseum’s approach also adheres to the Charter toolkit recommendation 9:

“Involves Black and Minoritised communities recognising and claiming their rightful place within the knowledge-production wider ecosystem, also as researchers themselves, and advocating for ownership of their own knowledge, skills and data.”

The UnMuseum project acknowledges communities as the experts of their lived experiences and as the authority on the systemic issues they face. Many community members have been practising community archiving for years, and we regard their insights as authoritative and practice-informed. With this in mind, the UnMuseum project ultimately aims to create a community-operated archive that respects the ownership of their stories, artefacts, histories, and knowledge.

Conclusion

Having led the reader through the common barriers to co-produced and anti-racist approaches into the various ways that the Charter can help solve these problems, with examples of the Charter’s flexible usage in different aspects of the co-produced research system, we hope this essay has convinced its audience that change is, indeed, within sight. 

Certainly, change is already occurring. Amongst research institutions, the University of Bristol Medical School is looking into the Charter to adjust their strategies for researching healthcare for Black people in the UK. The National Centre of Research Methods is also including the Charter into their course materials for a research methods training course via Professor Helen Thomas-Hughes, whose work helped influence the Charter’s approach. Furthermore, the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West is developing a co-production community of practice using the Charter as reference.

Amongst funders, the Nuffield Foundation has been consulting the Charter to consider making changes to their practices. All you need is the courage to take that first step, innovating your way into a more equitable future for research, where knowledge production and its benefits belong equally to all.

A PDF VERSION OF THIS ESSAY IS AVAILABLE HERE

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This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0  

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are not representative of the views of the British Science Association or UK Research and Innovation.