Centres for Exchange

Centres for Exchange is a collaborative learning and design project that aims to foster innovation in equitable and inclusive health research and the open exchange of knowledge. The project’s ultimate goal is to realise principles of equity, inclusion, and care in health research by enabling research projects and products that emerge from, resonate with, and create meaningful impact for the communities they serve.

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Project Background

In 2022, Wellcome’s Community Engagement team commissioned Pivot Collective Consulting and their partners Eh!woza, Fiocruz, Praxis, Restless Development, and Vocal to carry out a landscaping and co-design project called Centres for Exchange. While global in scope, the project focused on place-based learning in India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya.

Moving beyond conventional framings of community engagement, this project explores the landscape of participation in health research more broadly to understand what more reciprocal relationships might look like, how benefits of new knowledge can be shared more equitably, and what is required for diverse communities to participate as experts in the production and exchange of knowledge. The scoping phase of this project has worked to gather a wide range of perspectives on these issues and to bring them together to craft a vision for change. We invite you to join our critical conversation and share your insights and learning.

This website is intended as a living repository of insights and learning from the Centres for Exchange initiative. In the site’s visual language, we have chosen the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe the development of the Centres for Exchange concept, drawing its roots from rich underground springs of embedded knowledge to reveal diverse, interconnected forests of learning and pathways for growth and change.

Why this project?

The motivation for the Centres for Exchange work stems from a widespread acknowledgement of the long-standing and historically shaped power inequalities that structure health research as well as the need for research to be more engaged, equitable and impactful. Critical conversations on participation, decolonisation, and epistemic justice have guided the transformative practices of community activists, participatory researchers, and grassroots practitioners in the global South for decades. More recently, prominent institutions and actors in the global North have also recognised the necessity of shifting their practices to promote inclusion and equity in knowledge production in order to achieve better health and social outcomes for all. 

Despite increasing this commitment, however, there is a lack of consensus on how to foster meaningful, equitable, and inclusive research collaborations. Diverse actors in different localities hold pieces of the puzzle but these pieces have not been brought together to see the full picture — one that is complex and context-specific. At the same time, without radical change in unequal structures of power in the research ecosystem — including the systems that govern research funding, research practice, and the translation of knowledge — meaningful change is not possible.

Wellcome Trust, the largest health research funder in the UK, has made a commitment that by 2031, all Wellcome-funded research will be inclusive in both design and practice. Aligned with this commitment, they have commissioned Pivot Collective to carry out this scoping and design project to explore potential pathways for change.

Project approach

underwater scene
underground lake in a cave
staircase leading to underground grotto
Big tree
clouds over a forest
underwater scene

Inception

(Mar-Apr 2023)

Across this project, we’re committed to ensuring that sensitivity to power and context guide both our collaborative process and the final architecture and knowledge products we co-develop. We launched the collaborative project with an inception phase that allowed us to gather around the key values we wanted to uphold and ways of working that align with them. An interesting (and perhaps unsurprising) learning of the process is that the values we cohered around at project inception resonate strongly with the core principles that emerged as at the core of effective, inclusive knowledge exchange.

underground lake

Landscaping

(May-Jul 2023)

The landscaping phase allowed us to map the broader field of engagement, participation, and knowledge exchange in health research through a desktop review, a rapid survey, and a series of key informants interviews, developing a series of insights that framed the next phases of the project.

staircase to underground grotto

Models of practice

(Aug - Sep 2023)

While designing a framework for practice across contexts, we were committed to ensuring the work was grounded in the deep insights that emerge from perspectives and practices in complex social contexts. To this end, the next phase of the project focused on learning from models of practice from around the world, focusing in particular on four priority geographies: South Africa, India, Brazil, and Kenya. In this phase, we produced 20 in-depth case studies with organisations that held promising insights through their innovative practices in context. The case studies included interviews but also some dialogue events with researchers, practitioners, and lived experience experts.

Big tree

Concept development

(Oct-Dec 2023)

This was followed by a series of place-based design workshops in South Africa, India, and Brazil with representatives from the case study organisations and other key stakeholders. In the workshops, we worked to co-create the guiding principles and purposes of the Centres for Exchange model. We then worked to ground the principles in practice through the refinement of the project concept, architecture and strategies, which we refined through sense-checking webinars and workshops with diverse stakeholders.

clouds over a jungle

Way forward

(Jan-Sep 2024)

The next stage of the Centres for Exchange project will be focused on:
(1) Funding a small number of organisations to learn more deeply through practice about core components of Centres for Exchange vision and
(2) Facilitating a broader cross-project learning network to synthesise evidence and learning and inform Wellcome’s longer term strategy for the Centres for Exchange.

Along the way, we’ve been documenting this learning and design process as we go, through feedback loops and regular learning reviews to allow for iteration and adaptation.

People and organisations

The Centres for Exchange project is commissioned by Wellcome Trust and led by Pivot Collective, a South African social enterprise organisation committed to improving knowledge translation between research, engagement, policy, and practice. To enable genuine collaboration and co-design, we’ve brought together a dynamic and diverse group of collaborators representing key partners and networks in the space of community engagement and participatory research in the global South, including Restless Development, Praxis, Vocal, Fiocruz, and Eh!woza. We’ve also worked closely with colleagues from the Engagement team at Wellcome.

Meet our team

Get to know the talented individuals behind our project.

Lindsey Reynolds
Lindsey Reynolds
Project lead
  • Critical global health
  • Ethics of engagement
  • knowledge translation
Clemence Petit-Perrot
Clemence Petit-Perrot
Project co-lead
  • Communication for change
  • Collaborative media
  • Inclusive innovation
Gustavo Matta
Gustavo Matta
Lead, Latin America
  • Health social science
  • Health inequalities
  • Decolonial theory
Sarah Hyder Iqbal
Sarah Hyder Iqbal
Co-lead, India
  • Science engagement
  • Participatory science
  • Life sciences research
Pradeep Narayanan
Pradeep Narayanan
Co-lead, India
  • Participatory development
  • Participatory action research
  • Community-led monitoring
Maria Malomalo
Maria Malomalo
EDI lead
  • Gender inclusivity
  • Youth engagement
  • African feminism
Tasha Koch
Tasha Koch
Lead, South Africa
  • Community engagement
  • Youth advocacy
  • Infectious disease
Renata Cortez-Gómez
Renata Cortez-Gómez
Co-lead, Latin America
  • Gender and health
  • Interculturality and health
  • Environmental health
Adalton Fonseca
Adalton Fonseca
Co-lead, Brazil
  • Public Engagement
  • Science Communication
  • Diversity, equity and inclusion
Bella Starling
Bella Starling
Co-lead, concept
  • Public Involvement
  • Inclusive research
  • Strategy and policy
Haidee Bell
Haidee Bell
Engagement, Wellcome
  • Social design and innovation
  • Partnering for impact
Duncan Collins Adams
Duncan Collins Adams
Engagement, Wellcome
  • Community engagement
  • Strategic overview
Jo Zaremba
Jo Zaremba
Communications adviser
  • Facilitation & Participation
  • Multi-stakeholder engagement
Ruwa Mahdi
Ruwa Mahdi
Engagement, Wellcome
  • Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
  • Qualitative Methodologies
Raíza Tourinho
Raíza Tourinho
Researcher, Brazil
  • Science Communication.
  • Science Connection
  • Data journalism.
Mariana Sebastião
Mariana Sebastião
Researcher, Brazil
  • Science Communication.
  • Educommunication.
  • Public Engagement.
Denise Pimenta
Denise Pimenta
Researcher, Brazil
  • Social Anthropology
  • Gender Studies
  • Public Engagement with Science

Partners and collaborators

Explore key insights from the landscaping research

Explore Insights