Centres for
Exchange
Centres for Exchange is a collaborative global learning initiative supporting community organisations, researchers, and practitioners to explore, strengthen, and build on equitable approaches to producing and sharing health research through reciprocal learning and exchange. The initiative aims to strengthen research practices and systems so that community knowledge meaningfully shapes research questions, processes, and outcomes.
Project Background
The Centres for Exchange (CfE) initiative emerged from a global landscaping and co-design project commissioned in 2022 by the Wellcome Trust to better understand how knowledge is produced, shared, and valued in health research. Led by Pivot Collective with partners across India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, and Kenya, Phase 1 focused on place-based learning with diverse knowledge communities to explore how participation in health research is practiced in different contexts, and how more reciprocal and equitable relationships are formed.
This work centred learning from existing practice, examining how community knowledge is recognised, how power and benefits are distributed, and how communities participate as experts in shaping research questions, processes, and outcomes. Insights from this collaborative inquiry informed a shared vision for more equitable, inclusive, and context-responsive approaches to knowledge exchange, grounded in the recognition that communities most affected by health challenges must play a meaningful and reciprocal role in shaping research.
Phase 2 builds on this foundation by supporting a group of seed-funded organisations that bring diverse forms of expertise and experience to questions of equity, participation, and knowledge exchange in health research. This work is supported by enabling partners who facilitate learning, reflection, evidence-building, knowledge exchange, network weaving and relational processes across projects, alongside Wellcome as funder and strategic partner. Together, this collective learning brings insights from place-based projects into dialogue and contributes to strengthening research practices and generating evidence that can inform how researchers, institutions, and funders better support and resource inclusive, equitable, and impactful community-engaged research over time.
Learning from Phase 2 is shared openly as the work develops, with regular updates through the Learning and Resources pages. Over time, CfE also seeks to grow a wider community of practice around equitable knowledge exchange, inviting others to engage with the learning and contribute to an evolving field of practice.
Learning Trajectories
Landscaping and co-design
Phase 1 insights surfaced a central tension in health research: while community engagement is widely seen as essential, it is often practiced in ways that protect existing research power rather than redistribute it. Examining models of practice across contexts reframed the challenge as one of recognition, resourcing, and institutional support, not a lack of participatory methods.
These insights shaped the Centres for Exchange concept: an approach to equitable knowledge exchange that centres power shifting through community-driven agenda setting, long-term relationships of trust, and reciprocal learning within and across place-based knowledge communities.
Learning from Practice
As projects unfold and learning is shared across contexts, Phase 2 learning is surfacing how equitable knowledge exchange is shaped through process rather than predefined methods. Early learning suggests that shared meaning does not pre-exist participation, but is actively produced through co-design, reflection, and lived experience leadership, reshaping what counts as rigour and expertise in practice.
At the same time, partners are encountering how institutional structures (from funding timelines to research governance) can quietly reassert control, reinforcing that shifting power is ongoing, relational, and contested. Together, these dynamics are prompting new approaches to learning itself, held as cumulative, reflective, and collectively stewarded rather than extracted against fixed indicators.