Health and Social Equity Collective

Key information 

• Partner(s): The Wellcome Trust and King’s College London
• Amount: £540,872
• Duration: Three years to January 2026
• Programme: Innovation

Background

We’ve partnered with the Wellcome Trust and King’s College London to support a collaborative network of researchers, community leaders, policymakers and health professionals working to tackle social and health inequities.

The Collective addresses health inequities by enabling new, collaborative ways of generating knowledge, that is inclusive and accessible to researchers, community organisations and policymakers.

By putting communities at the heart of what gets researched and centring the lived experience of people from marginalised backgrounds, the Collective aims to reshape narratives and create practical strategies to reduce health and social inequalities.

Aims of the partnership

Together, we’re co-creating new ways for professionals to collaborate – challenging what gets researched, whose voices are heard and what evidence is valued.

One of the ways the Collective has done this is through the Community Organised Research for Equity (CORE) programme, a fund that backs community organisations to explore research projects to understand more about health inequalities in Southwark and Lambeth.

Through this investment, we want to learn how communities define and measure impact for themselves, what shared accountability looks like, and how funding can support long-term resilience instead of short-term projects.

This partnership is part of our Shifting the Power portfolio, which aims to move power in research and evidence towards communities. By centring the voices of people with lived experience of health inequalities, we’re making our work more inclusive and impactful.