Community Knowledge Incubator Fund

We are delighted to announce this year's awardees of the Community Knowledge Incubator Fund.

Following the success of our Connecting Communities pilot phase, this year we opened our first open call for Community Knowledge Incubator funding. The fund seeks to strengthen support for communities to investigate their own questions, challenges, and ideas, and to work with university researchers when it leads to a clear, shared benefit.

We learnt a great deal from our partners during the pilot phase, which has directly shaped the Community Knowledge Incubator Fund. Most importantly, we saw how creating open, welcoming spaces for communities to explore their own ideas from the outset helps centre community knowledge. The pilot also showed that meaningful collaboration grows from sustained trust building, inclusive ways of working, and giving communities the time and space to define priorities before connecting with researchers. By supporting community-led projects, the Community Knowledge Incubator Fund aims to play a role in ensuring research reflects real experiences and brings meaningful benefits to the communities involved. You can read more about the pilot phase in our Connecting Communities blog. 

The Community Knowledge Incubator Fund is the first time that the Public Engagement team have launched an open funding knowledge exchange opportunity for community groups. We were thrilled to receive such a high number of applications this year, with many demonstrating impressive creativity and originality. The judging panel highlighted the impressive standard across all the proposals.  

We are incredibly grateful to our Community Knowledge Working Group, part of our fantastic new Community Engagement Advisory Board, for their involvement in the fund’s judging process. Made up of community members and university staff, the panel brings a wealth of knowledge and perspectives from across different areas. This was their first opportunity to play a leading role in a major decision-making process, and they’ll continue to play an important role in shaping and guiding the fund as it develops.  Rhys Grant, one of our members, offered the following reflection: 

We are delighted to be supporting these eight new projects and look forward to seeing the insights and impact that emerge from their research. We will be sharing as we go, so keep an eye out for more updates! 

If you are interested in hearing more about the fund, or are thinking of applying in next year's round we would be happy to have a conversation, please do get in touch with us at communityengagement@admin.cam.ac.uk 

Voices of Experience: A Co-produced Audio Series Exploring Experiences of Homelessness in Cambridge 

Experience Cambridge 

We will create a short audio series featuring the actual voices of people experiencing homelessness. Currently, local understanding is shaped by statistics or negative tropes of "crime, nuisance, and neediness." This project challenges those misconceptions by empowering a specially-formed co-production group of people with lived experience to design, conduct, and record interviews themselves. Using existing connections with people with lived experience and local organisations like Wintercomfort, Cyrenians, Jimmy’s and local authorities, the group will recruit and interview peers with lived experience, as well as service staff and university researchers, prioritising the voices of experience. Our staff will provide support and technical editing, the co-production group will retain editorial control, giving directions on how to structure the episodes. This ensures that information about homelessness is collected and presented by those who live it, focusing on what they think is important for the community to know about their lives, victories, and barriers.

Young People’s Untold Stories of Inpatient Mental Health Care  

Hospital Rooms 

This project builds on Hospital Rooms’ work exploring lived experiences of young people in inpatient mental health care including recent projects in Sandwell CAMHS and Parkview inpatient CAMHS wards.  

It will be delivered in partnership with two inpatient CAMHS services in the South of England. The wider programme will lead to the co-creation of 18 permanent artworks and creative programmes across inpatient wards, embedding young people’s voices within care environments. The Cambridge Community Knowledge Incubator Fund will specifically support the creation of a youth-led publication, co-edited by young people, that captures their insights and reflections on the impact of the environmental transformations on their wards. 

This will be delivered as a Service Evaluation in partnership with the NHS Trusts. The project will surface untold, community-held knowledge to inform more humane and relational inpatient mental health services for young people. 

Uncovering the Untold Stories of Rare Disease: A Community-Led Research Incubator 

CamRARE 

Led by the charity Cambridge Rare Disease Network (CamRARE), this project will support underrepresented rare-disease families in surfacing their “untold stories” and translating lived experience into community-defined research priorities. While rare disease research is often investigator-led, families hold deep, often hidden knowledge about what truly matters in daily life, knowledge that rarely shapes research agendas. Building on CamRARE’s research pillar and our Rare Disease Research Network (RDRN), we will create a community-led knowledge incubator that moves families from research “subjects” to agenda-setters and active drivers of research ideas. 

Through outreach, peer mentoring, and co-designed workshops, we will support individuals with rare conditions and families, particularly those who do not usually engage in research, to frame their experiences as cross-cutting research priorities such as mental health, diagnostic odyssey, and living with co-morbidities. These priorities will be captured in accessible, community-authored research briefs and shared with university partners, creating a sustainable pathway for lived experience to shape future research and funding bids. 

A Social Model of Suffering: Responding to Distress Beyond the Therapy Room 

Cambridge Acorn Project  

Our project will run for a year, in three disadvantaged communities in Cambridge City and be centred around the weekly drop-ins we run in these communities. Through this, we want to use a combination of clinical data (using the standardised measure MyCAW - Measure Yourself Concerns and Wellbeing) and qualitative interviews/feedback to gather the views of our community on what they believe will help to alleviate, and ultimately eliminate, suffering, in their lives. In doing so, we will use a social, panoramic, model which locates the causes of suffering beyond the person and in the social and economic structures they inhabit. 

From our community, we want to understand the conditions, events, situations, which, they feel, cause suffering in their lives and, vitally, what, they also feel, can help to alleviate that suffering. In doing so, this will help us to understand the impact of our drop-ins but also, vitally, to understand the support people themselves feel they require to help us, as a society, move beyond the language of 'intervention' and into wider social change.

Beyond Words: Creating new BSL Signs to Improve Cancer Understanding and Inclusion 

Cambridgeshire Deaf Association & Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre

Effective cancer care relies heavily upon clear communication and often uses specific terminology for activities such as explaining a diagnosis or discussing treatment options. 

Deaf, deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals face significant barriers to accessing clear, engaging cancer information, contributing to delayed diagnosis, poorer outcomes, and low research participation. Cancer campaigns rarely include British Sign Language (BSL) or visually accessible materials, leaving this community excluded from screening initiatives and clinical trials. The absence of standardised BSL signs for cancer terminology further restricts effective communication with healthcare professionals, reinforcing confusion and stigma. 

This project addresses these inequities by identifying gaps in cancer-related BSL vocabulary and co-developing new signs with the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. It will co-produce accessible resources supported by captions, voiceovers, and visual diagrams to disseminate the new terminology widely. By strengthening communication and shared understanding, the project aims to improve cancer awareness, engagement, and outcomes within this underserved population. 

Mapping Community Food Assets for Civil Food Resilience 

Cambridge Sustainable Food, Department of Architecture & Cambridge Room 

This project maps community food assets - including places, organisations and skills - in Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire to increase the strength and resilience of the local food system. Through workshops, community consultations and an in-depth survey, it harnesses community knowledge to create and share rich and vital data - including asset lists, maps and detailed analysis of existing provision and gaps in provision. This will increase organisational resilience and community food security in the face of food shocks and crises, such as another pandemic, supply chain disruption, price spikes or geopolitical events.

Spaces, Culture and Belonging: Exploring Young People’s Conceptualisations of Belonging Through Visual Art 

CB Mentoring & Kettle's Yard

Our project will explore how Black and Global Majority young people experience cultural spaces, belonging, and identity in Cambridge. The project will engage 10–15 participants aged 10–18 through a series of 6–8 creative workshops delivered in accessible community and cultural venues, including sessions hosted by CB Mentoring and collaborative activity with Kettle's Yard. 

Through creative mapping, collage, storytelling, photography, and peer-led discussion, participants will explore questions such as: Where do young people feel welcomed or excluded? Which places and cultural experiences shape their sense of identity? What stories about Cambridge are missing from mainstream narratives? Participants will co-design simple surveys and story circles to capture shared experiences and produce creative outputs, including artworks and short audio or visual pieces reflecting “Cambridge through their eyes.” 

An immersive expression of Research in Art: Curated by children from Black, Asian and ethnically diverse backgrounds and those experiencing economic hardship. 

KHEPER C & Fitzwilliam Museum 

A specially recruited group of children and adolescents will be invited to take part in an art project exploring what research means to them linking their present time context to imagining their future expectations. 

Ideas generated through the project will be expressed through artworks made by the children which then form part of a co - curated display at the Museum. The children will work collaboratively with the Health Equalities Research Network (KHEPER C), Fitzwilliam Practitioner Researchers, and local Cambridgeshire artists. 

Exposure to the museum and its artefacts will inspire and nurture creativity, and promote a sense of connection, and agency. The children themselves will step into the position of “researcher” exploring and documenting their art experience in their own meaningful way over the course of the project.