We focus on four complex health issues more prevalent in urban areas
With the Social Progress Imperative, we've developed the first neighbourhood level, health-focused social progress index of its kind.
With Wellcome Trust
We want to hear from you.
Research and development
Advancing community-led urban health knowledge, locally and nationally
We’re investing in Centric Lab’s Urban Health Council, an independent research, collaboration, and advocacy platform engaging a range of organisations to positively influence urban health policy.
The Urban Health Council investigates how systems of power come together in urban places and contribute to health outcomes.
Over the next three years, Impact on Urban Health will act as an anchor funder, enabling the Council’s network of practitioners, policy experts and campaigners to advance community-led health knowledge both locally and nationally. The Council will support its members to investigate how systems of power contribute to health outcomes in urban areas by sharing tactics, research and best practice and putting the communities at the centre of developing strategies to improve health.
Our funding will support the Urban Health Council as they continue to grow their work in three key areas: research; special partnerships; and storytelling and creative content.
We are particularly interested in ensuring that lived experience is centred within health research, practice and campaigning.
We hope to see:
“ We're excited to partner with Impact on Urban Health for the Urban Health Council as this funding and partnership helps deepen and sustain the pathways from lived experience-based research to influencing policy outcomes and social narratives. Araceli Camargo Director at Centric Lab
We're excited to partner with Impact on Urban Health for the Urban Health Council as this funding and partnership helps deepen and sustain the pathways from lived experience-based research to influencing policy outcomes and social narratives.
This investment is part of our Shifting the Power in Research portfolio with the Wellcome Trust.
People experiencing the consequences of health inequity have the greatest potential to benefit from research, but often don’t have a say in what is studied and how. And whilst people can learn about, and be inspired, by research, they have few opportunities to contribute in ways that build, support and sustain their communities.
If funding models don’t include the perspectives and lived experience of people who are affected, then research is less likely to result in meaningful assets that will improve long-term health. Currently, it is those with the time, resources and know-how who are much more likely to be successful in accessing funding; but their perspectives may not reflect the priorities, needs and interests of people experiencing poor health outcomes, and may hold conscious or unconscious biases.
For urban areas to become healthier places for everyone to live, we must recognise our own role in perpetuating some of the negative aspects of research culture and work to rebalance the distribution of power, money, and resources we have as funders, to create more equitable and inclusive health research and funding practices.
Centric Lab use neuroscience and environmental data to identify how biological inequity contributes to poor health in neighbourhoods and people that have been racialised and marginalised. They use this research to build open-access community tools, create new narratives and framings of health, and provide organisations with expertise and insights on health and place. Centric Lab is led by a team of scientists from under-represented communities that are Black, Indigenous, and descendants of immigrant communities. This plays a key role in how they frame the science, the type of work that is chosen, and how they do the work.