In 2022, Wellcome’s Community Engagement team commissioned Pivot Collective Consulting and their partners Eh!woza, Fiocruz, Praxis, Restless Development, and Vocal to carry out a landscaping and co-design project called Centres for Exchange. While global in scope, the project focused on place-based learning in India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya.
Moving beyond conventional framings of community engagement, this project explores the landscape of participation in health research more broadly to understand what more reciprocal relationships might look like, how benefits of new knowledge can be shared more equitably, and what is required for diverse communities to participate as experts in the production and exchange of knowledge. The scoping phase of this project has worked to gather a wide range of perspectives on these issues and to bring them together to craft a vision for change. We invite you to join our critical conversation and share your insights and learning.
This website is intended as a living repository of insights and learning from the Centres for Exchange initiative. In the site’s visual language, we have chosen the metaphor of an ecosystem to describe the development of the Centres for Exchange concept, drawing its roots from rich underground springs of embedded knowledge to reveal diverse, interconnected forests of learning and pathways for growth and change.