RESEARCH DESIGN FOR SOCIAL IMPACT · NEXT INTAKE Q3 2027
Research that
stays yours.
An eight-week programme for practitioners building the evidence infrastructure their own organisation needs. By the end, you will be able to design and lead anti-oppressive research from inside — not commission it, not wait for it.
Join the 2027 waitlist
WHY THIS PROGRAMME EXISTS
The evaluation was designed elsewhere.
Most community-based organisations are asked to prove their worth using frameworks somebody else wrote. The questions arrive pre-formed. The indicators arrive pre-chosen. The evaluation is designed elsewhere, delivered by a consultant who leaves, and returns a report describing the work in language nobody inside the organisation recognises.
We know how that happens, because we have been on both sides of it. We have written those terms of reference. We have been the consultant who left.
This programme builds the other thing. Evidence infrastructure that belongs to the organisation, answers the questions it actually holds, and still satisfies the people funding it. Rigour and refusal are not opposites here — the work has to stand up, and it has to stay yours.
What you leave holding.
01 — EVIDENCE INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN
What you track, and who it answers to
A working plan for your organisation: the questions you are actually asking, what you will gather, who decides, and how it continues after the programme ends.
02 — DATA GOVERNANCE ONE-PAGER
Including a community veto
A short, usable document setting out how data is collected, held and used — and where the community holds the right to say no. Adaptable for your board and your funders.
03 — A CO-ANALYSIS METHOD
Sense-making as a shared act
A method you can run with your community rather than about them — so interpretation stays with the people whose lives the data describes.
04 — LANGUAGE FOR THE FUNDER CONVERSATION
And where you draw the line
How to say what you mean inside terms a funder will accept — and how to recognise the point where translation becomes co-optation.
Eight weekly live sessions of 90 minutes, one 1:1 with Jess, and a critical friend mentor alongside you for the whole programme.
Your critical friend is someone to think the research through with as it takes shape — not a marker, not a supervisor. Somebody who has done this work and will help you shape the idea while it is still forming. All applied work is on your organisation's real evidence problem, not invented scenarios. Sessions run across UK, African, South Asian, European and Latin American time zones, and are recorded.
THE POLITICS OF THIS
Research is not a neutral skill.
It is part of how communities organise.
Anti-oppressive research is not a gentler way of collecting the same data. It changes who holds the question, who interprets the answer, and what becomes possible afterwards. When a community holds its own evidence, it can make demands it could not make before — and that is the point.
ORGANISATIONS ALREADY DOING IT
Throughout the course we work through case studies of organisations that have built community research into how they operate — not as a project with an end date, but as a standing capability. What they set up, what it cost them, what they had to refuse.
BUDGETING WITH CARE
Participation that isn't budgeted for isn't participation — it's unpaid labour with a nicer name. We work through what it actually costs to pay community researchers properly, and how to write that into a bid without it being the first line cut.
WHO ACTUALLY FUNDS THIS
There are funders who resource community-led research properly, and there are funders who will ask you to do it for free inside a delivery grant. We go through who is who, and how to approach the first group.
TAUGHT FROM EXPERIENCE, NOT ABOUT IT
The theory is drawn from radical thinkers — the reading you were not given at school. But it is facilitated by people who have organised, evaluated and lived inside these systems, including facilitators bringing lived experience of incarceration and of frontline organising.
Evidence is not the end of the work. It is what makes the next demand possible.
TRACK RECORD
We have run this before. Eight times.
Six cohorts ran between 2023 and 2025 as a Continuing Professional Development strand of the STAR project — in partnership with the University of East London and the University of Bristol, funded by the Office for Students and Research England, under the name Rebellious Research for Social Action. That UK programme drew 202 applications with almost no promotion.
Alongside it we ran two global cohorts of self-funding and organisation-funded participants, joining from eight time zones across Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean.
8
cohorts delivered
2023 – 2025
175+
practitioners
UK and international
8
time zones
across four continents
9.2
out of 10
average recommendation score
Who was in the room
Learners came from organisations working at the sharpest edges of social justice — racial justice, migration, disability liberation, gender justice, housing and community health — in the UK and internationally.
Among them: The Runnymede Trust · Shelter · Refugee Council · Disability Rights UK · Scope · Birthrights · Helen Bamber Foundation · Rape Crisis South London · Black Women Rising · BLAM UK · SARI · Trans Legal Clinic · Newham Community Project · Positively UK · People's Economy · Women & Girls Network · Reset UK · The Advocacy Academy · London Borough of Hackney · Renaisi — among many others.
Try the work before you commit to it
The programme produced eight open-access guides and four how-to videos, free to any community organisation under a Creative Commons licence — covering trauma-informed research ethics, intersectionality in community research, creative and grassroots methods, co-design, co-analysis, resisting funder extraction, and knowledge justice.
Nothing is gated and no email is required. If you want to know how this programme thinks before you join a waitlist, start there.
EXPLORE THE FREE RESOURCE HUB“Highly recommended for anyone hoping to inspire change in research design.”
Nina Rivera
United Domestic Workers Association
“I can't begin to explain how useful it's been — to the point that I'm starting a new community research role.”
Elio Yague
Course participant
“I am excited to be applying my learning to our community movement-building work.”
Bhavika Patel
Power & Integrity
The learning arc.
Eight weeks, one capability each. Every week ends with something you hold, and the whole thing builds toward evidence infrastructure your organisation can run without us.
Week 1 — What counts as evidence here, and who decided that
- Map the evidence demands landing on your organisation: who is asking, what they are asking for, and what that framing assumes about you
- Leave with a starting position, not just a critique
Week 2 — Reading your own evaluation frameworks back
- Run the Language Audit on your own logframes, indicators and reports — where does the language locate the problem, in people or in structures?
- Put the history back into one indicator you are currently reporting against
Week 3 — Whose knowledge governs
- Audit the knowledge infrastructure of your enquiry: whose frameworks are governing, whose have been erased
- Apply epistemic sovereignty to one live design decision — after Tuhiwai Smith, and guarded by Tuck & Yang
Week 4 — Designing with, not on
- Work with critical participatory action research, photovoice and community cartography — and know which one your question actually calls for
- Learn the facilitation moves that make participation real inside a funder's timeline
Week 5 — Numbers are political
- The QuantCrit reframe: who counts, who is counted, and what your dataset is quietly asserting
- Build quantitative measures that survive scrutiny without flattening the people in them
Week 6 — Governance, consent and refusal
- Draft your data governance one-pager, including a community veto over collection and use
- Establish when refusal of data extraction is legitimate and defensible — and how to hold that line with a funder
Week 7 — Co-analysis, budgets and the money question
- Facilitate analysis as a shared act rather than a specialist one — including the SHOWED method for collective sense-making
- Budget with care: what it actually costs to pay community researchers properly, and how to write that into a bid
Week 8 — Evidence into organising
- Organise what you now hold into a case that moves resources and decisions
- Leave with your evidence infrastructure plan, and a map of the funders who actually resource this kind of work
Design for Social Impact has worked with dozens of organisations, including:
Whose work this is built on
These tools are adaptations, and saying so is part of the politics. The thinking below does real work in the room — not as a reading list, but as the method itself.
- QuantCrit (Gillborn and colleagues) — numbers are not neutral; data regimes decide who counts and who is counted
- Ruha Benjamin — the New Jim Code; how discriminatory design hides inside measurement
- CARE Principles, OCAP® and Te Mana Raraunga — Indigenous data sovereignty, and refusal as a designable position
- Linda Tuhiwai Smith — research as one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world, and what it takes to change that
- Tuck & Yang — decolonisation is not a metaphor; the guard against borrowing the language without moving anything
- Tara Yosso — community cultural wealth; assets where deficit framing expects to find need
- Sasha Costanza-Chock — design justice; who designs determines what gets designed
- Erica Kohl-Arenas — the self-help myth; how funding channels dissent into measurable, manageable forms
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — you cannot redistribute power you will not admit you hold
- Afro-Futurism — evidence about what could exist, not only what already does
WHO YOU LEARN WITH
Guest scholars, not guest speakers.
Each week brings a community conversation with a practitioner or scholar working at the intersection the session covers. Across cohorts we have deliberately built this around Global Majority research leadership — not as a diversity gesture, but because the people who have navigated racialised institutional barriers have the most precise things to say about how research reproduces them.
Scholars who have taught on this programme include Siza Dube (Black feminisms and reproductive justice, University of Bristol), Amanda Chappell (QuantCrit and racial inequalities in commissioning data), Mónica Sánchez Hernández (art-based and decolonising methodologies), Chiedza Chihanu (performance and social change), Dr Michelle Harewood (healing justice and cultural storytelling) and Dr Temidayo Esenou (Afro-Futurism as qualitative inquiry).
Faculty is confirmed per cohort. We don't name people before they have agreed.
WHAT IT COSTS
These are the current rates, shown so you can plan. We confirm 2027 rates with the waitlist first — and waitlist members get the early-bird price, and first call on the funded places, before enrolment opens to anyone else. Parity pricing by location applies at every tier: we price this way because we pay our facilitators and collaborators properly, and that shapes who is in the room.
The 2027 intake opens in Q3.
Places go to the waitlist first — with the dates, the early-bird rate, and first call on the funded places, before this page goes anywhere near LinkedIn.
Joining costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. You will also get our guide to the Design for Social Impact framework straight away.
Join the 2027 waitlist
No spam. We write when the dates are confirmed, and when places open.
For foundations funding this for partners
Grantee partners are repeatedly asked to evidence their work using frameworks they did not write, and repeatedly funded to buy that capability in from outside. It leaves when the contract ends.
We run this as a closed cohort for a single portfolio — scoped with your learning team, delivered to your partners, so the capability stays inside the organisations rather than with a consultant. Parity pricing and funded places are built into the design.
If that is a conversation worth having, write to Jessica directly at [email protected].