We are a values-driven organisation, centering all of our work around a fundamental commitment to social justice, equity, and inclusion.
We are dedicated to championing the causes that affect marginalised people and those at risk of exclusion, and endeavour to work collaboratively with diverse communities on projects that strive to shift power, facilitate collective understanding, foster critical and creative thinking, and ensure effective cycles of evidence to action.
We support each other to stay accountable to our core values across our projects. This requires careful attention to both process and outcomes in all the work we do.
Across our work, we work to de-center where and how we locate and conceive of research, knowledge production, and engagement.
We do this in part by challenging and supporting health researchers, humanities and social sciences scholars, and health and development practitioners and policy makers to question their own assumptions and to engage with issues of marginalisation and justice more explicitly in their own work.
We also work to make the operations of power visible through our critical research, our critically engaged approach to pedagogy, and our inclusive programmatic practices.
To ensure that the knowledge we produce is continually relevant and actionable, and that it leads to innovative and effective solutions to entrenched challenges we must stay open to new ideas and new learning. As a collective, we draw on participatory and co-creative methodologies to foster unconventional and innovative ways of tackling complex problems.
This involves a commitment to practising deep listening, with a particular attention to the unexpected and a willingness to move beyond our existing frameworks and assumptions. It also involves translating what we have heard and learned into creative and co-created strategies for social change.
We believe that innovations emerge from open-ended and collaborative processes that engage diverse voices.
We are committed to ensuring that the voices of young people, people with diverse gender and sexual identities, people with chronic illness, and others with intersectional experiences of adversity are centred.
We do this by ensuring that the communities most affected have genuine co-ownership of learning journeys through an active commitment to co-creation, collaborative network building, and capacity strengthening.
We work with people with lived experiences and affected communities throughout every phase of our projects, shifting power in the facilitation and research process into their hands wherever possible. We believe that amplifying voices requires creating safe spaces for critical dialogues that intentionally centre the voices of those less often heard.
We believe the effort to shift power necessarily starts with how we work within our own organisation, with partners, and through our projects. Drawing on feminist ethics of care, we are intentional about nurturing a caring and collaborative community within our organisation and in our work with partners and allies.
This requires creating safe and inclusive spaces that acknowledge individual and collective forms of trauma, and the diverse forms of support and care that people need to ensure their individual and collective well-being. It also requires a commitment to recognising and upholding diverse perspectives, experiences, and needs.
Through our local programmes and global partnerships, we work to expand our ethic of care to others working in the social justice space by fostering equitable relationships and productive spaces for collaboration and co-learning.
Linked to our commitments to amplifying voices and shifting power, we focus on ensuring that the forms of knowledge we produce are inclusive and accessible, using visual and interactive approaches where possible. We think of knowledge translation as the processes through which different forms of knowledge move between spaces, and across geographic and socioeconomic divides, to have real impact in the world.
Knowledge is not simply transferred from one place or person to another, in a linear or unidirectional fashion. Rather, it is continually co-created within diverse, shifting realities to serve the intersecting needs of knowledge users and modes of learning.
A central component of effective knowledge translation is that it moves beyond simple dissemination of knowledge to its actual use, mediated through relationships between different knowledge actors. Meaningful evidence-informed decision-making requires a genuine willingness to engage with diverse sources of evidence, to question one’s own assumptions, and to continually foster and facilitate changes in policy and programming based on new evidence.
