Over the next six months, the Community Knowledge Fund grant recipients – who each received £10,000 – will be supported by The Young Foundation to play a stronger role in research and innovation by developing and testing new ideas and approaches to creating, sharing and using the knowledge held within their communities.
Ottoline Leyser, UKRI’s Chief Executive, said:
“Research and innovation are central to the future of everyone in the UK, and everyone should be able to contribute to and benefit from the research and innovation endeavour. I am delighted that this funding will support communities to do that.”
Helen Goulden OBE, Chief Executive at The Young Foundation, said:
“The Community Knowledge Fund is dedicated to opening up opportunities for more people to get involved in research and innovation, and for communities themselves to determine, develop and deliver change that is meaningful to them. Over time, we hope that this will contribute to a much broader movement towards a more inclusive and expansive network of researchers and innovators across the UK.”
Grants have been awarded in three categories:
1. Community safety and resilience grantees:
- Culture Access CIC will use lived experience as data to enable wider participation, access and inclusion of disabled people in research.
- Generations Working Together are conducting research to test how intergenerational relationships build community cohesion.
- Justlife Foundation is researching how minoritised communities interact with emergency and temporary accommodation.
- Torbay Community Development Trust Ltd will conduct research to better understand how communities define ‘resilience’.
- Centric Lab works with local people to explore the lived realities of marginalised communities.
- Bristol 247 CIC seeks to tackle misinformation and connect communities through reliable news.
- Own Merit CIC is building research to understand challenges facing the resettlement of prisoners.
- Manchester Digital Laboratory (MadLab) is developing a research centre to drive decision-making about tech training investment.
2. Environment and sustainability grantees:
- Children in Wales seeks to create knowledge about the impact of climate change on young people’s health, education, work opportunities and social lives.
- Westcountry Rivers Trust aims to generate robust evidence and understanding of water quality.
- Homebaked Community Land Trust is working on an efficient and equitable roll-out of retrofit.
- Climate Hebrides will support community involvement in participatory mapping activities.
- Surrey County Council will engage people from different faiths and backgrounds with environmentalism and empower them to act to mitigate climate change.
- Cobra Collective CIC will drive community-led research, learning and knowledge-exchange among food-growing initiatives.
- Global Grooves is supporting micro-hydro electricity generation in a rural community.
- Landworkers’ Alliance is researching agro-ecological farming practices.
3. Open category grantees:
- The Shoebox Enterprises CIC will drive local community research.
- Starting Point Community will build greater understanding of the value and potential of research in communities.
- Wakefield Libraries seeks to test how a community research network and public services can shape a local approach to heritage collections.
- Northern Ireland Youth Forum is exploring rights, research and social justice.
- Purple Patch Arts is working with learning-disabled co-researchers and non-disabled researchers.
- Camden Giving will develop and test a community-led approach to research root causes of structural racism in Birmingham and Camden.
- Devon Community Foundation is bridging local food producers with local people through community research.
- Groundswell will co-develop and test a trauma-informed approach to peer research to help research institutions support people with lived experience of homelessness.
Find out more about the programme and read more about the grantees.
Community needs & priorities Innovation and Investment Local economies Peer research Posted on: 1 February 2023