In brief

The Ideas Fund supports communities to develop their own ideas, working alongside researchers to explore the questions that matter to them. They’ve been looking closely at what relationships make possible, what they need, and what happens when things aren’t straightforward.

Join us on Zoom on 26th November, 11am – 12pm to hear more and share your experiences. RSVP here. Everyone is welcome.

Kirsty Neale is a Grants and Learning Manager at the British Science Association and works on The Ideas Fund. Her work brings her alongside communities, researchers and partners to explore how they can work together in more equitable ways, what that makes possible, and the role that relationships and learning play along the way.

Relationships are fundamental to how The Ideas Fund works. When we talk about community research, we mean research led by and shaped with communities, rather than research being done to or about them.

We believe relationships are fundamental and foundational to equitable community research, and we’re investing in relationships as a way to rebuild trust and rebalance power towards communities.

Working alongside our learning partner, Collaborate CIC, we’ve been looking more closely at what relationships make possible, what they need, and what happens when things aren’t straightforward. We have explored some tensions to navigate such as when trust meets accountability, flexibility needs structure, or strong relationships come up against systems that work in opposing ways.

We’re beginning to see some clear insights from The Ideas Fund, but there is much more to learn. Alongside these tensions to navigate, there are four ideas emerging that we’d like to explore with others, not as finished answers, but as starting points to challenge and develop together.

This feels like a natural conversation to be having with the Relationships Project, bringing our experience of supporting community research into wider thinking about the place of relationships across organisations and systems. We’d love to hear your thoughts, experience and insights too. Please join us on 26th November, 11am – 12pm GMT to discuss. 

Relationships can create agency, not just connection

We’re interested not just in trust, but in what that trust makes possible. For communities working with researchers, being invited into research isn’t the same as having a real say in it. As trust grows, people can feel more able to question assumptions, share their knowledge and influence what the work becomes. Therefore making research more relevant and impactful.

And perhaps the strongest relationships are not necessarily those without friction. Can people disagree, challenge a decision or say no without putting the relationship, or their place in the work, at risk? 

For equitable community research, we’ve seen that the value of relationships lies in the agency they can create and what that allows them to do differently together.

But whilst relationships, trust and agency is a powerful combination, tensions can arise when lines of accountability come into question. We’ve seen this tension arise when people occupy  several roles at once. 

When relationships change the direction of the work, who gets to decide what good progress looks like, and whose judgement counts? How can we navigate the tension between trust and accountability? 

Working relationally is something we can learn and practise

Listening, adapting, working through disagreement, paying attention to power and respecting boundaries all take skill and judgement. Working relationally doesn’t always mean becoming closer. There can be a tension between bringing your whole self to the work and maintaining professional boundaries. Knowing when clear boundaries are needed is part of the practice too.

Relational working should be treated as a capability that can be learnt, developed and supported. If we expect people to work this way, we need to invest in the practice as well as the relationships.

But who carries the work of holding relationships together, particularly when the systems around them work differently?

Relationships need the right conditions

Strong relationships can create space for doing things differently. But if that relies on particular people knowing how to work around an unhelpful system, it can be fragile. We’ve heard this, for example, from communities and researchers whose ways of working together can come up against academic processes and systems, such as contracts and ethics processes, that don’t support relational working, and can sometimes cause harm.

Relational infrastructure is the network of people, roles, spaces and systems that determines whether relational working can last, spread and become less dependent on particular individuals.

How can relationships, trust and knowledge live beyond particular people without formalising away the things that make those relationships work? And what does enough structure look like to support relationships without closing down what might emerge?

Although flexibility is also central to The Ideas Fund, it still has structure – contracts, budgets, reporting arrangements and formal decision-making responsibility. We have come to see this as scaffolding: enough structure to support people and hold the work, without building hard walls around what the work is allowed to become and without romanticising flexibility. 

Investment isn’t simply about more time or money

It’s about where time is spent, what can change, who has room to make decisions and who decides what progress looks like.

Investing in relationships means creating real room for the work to be changed by the relationships within it. Funders can’t ask people to work relationally while funding and accountability systems continue to reward certainty, control and predetermined delivery. 

Which leaves us with perhaps our biggest question: if we say relationships matter, are we prepared to let them genuinely change the work? And how much can one part of a system change when the organisations around it continue to work differently?

Help us develop the thinking

We’re pleased to be continuing this thinking with the Relationships Project. On 26 November 2026 (11am–12pm), we’ll be joining up for an open conversation to bring together different experiences, explore some of these questions and learn from one another. 

If any of this has sparked something for you, we’d love you to come along. The webinar is open to anyone with an interest in relationships and relational working, whether this is already part of your work or you’re curious to explore it with us. We’d really welcome different experiences, questions and perspectives as we work out where this thinking might go next.

Additionally, there’s more behind these ideas than we’ve been able to explore here. You can read our short paper on the learning so far and over on The Ideas Fund website. 

Get in touch with Kirsty to connect on this work: kirsty.neale@britishscienceassociation.org   

What is The Ideas Fund? 

The Ideas Fund is a grants programme run by the British Science Association and funded by Wellcome, which brings communities and researchers together to build strong relationships and collaborate on mental wellbeing projects. We use a simple, flexible grantmaking process supported by local ‘brokers’ and complemented by regional infrastructure work which aims to shape the local systems within which communities and researchers work together. Our work is grounded in the learning and insights that emerge throughout these projects and how these can inform and influence the wider system.