Research has the capacity to transform universities, communities and their places. The problem is that the funding architecture does not allow for sufficient sharing of power, benefits, or resources between communities, academics and non-academic partners.
How research funding is organised, distributed, and managed, spotlights issues of regional inequality and uneven cultural and economic growth.
These challenges, and how to address them, are at the heart of the Northumbria University led deep dive scoping report, By All, For All: The Power of Partnership, which provided the robust evidence base for best practice in partnership working and bridging knowledge gaps.
The report makes recommendations for devolving research power, directly addressing the UKRI strategic aim to work across an expanded research ecosystem, with communities as researchers rather than just the subjects of research.
Funding
A new round of Community Innovation Practitioner (CIP) Awards—the signature award of the Creative Communities programme–a £3.9 million investment funded by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and based at Northumbria University–is a direct result of those recommendations.
Harnessing the transformative power of devolution, the CIP Awards embed researchers directly within communities across all four devolved nations and devolved mayoral regions of the UK for a year. The awards contribute to an emerging evidence base on how culture can enhance belonging, address regional inequality, deliver devolution and break down barriers to opportunity for communities.
Underpinning the work of the CIPs is a fundamental question: what if we stopped doing research to communities and started doing it with them?
The first cohort of CIPs employed co-creative methodologies to address complex social challenges across diverse communities, from Belfast’s Market area to Welsh post-industrial regions and Liverpool’s healthcare settings. Their work aimed to empower marginalised communities through participatory cultural interventions, using arts, heritage, music and creative practices as vehicles for social change and community building.
Each practitioner developed innovative approaches to bridge academic research with grassroots community needs, fostering cross-sector collaborations that challenged traditional boundaries between universities, public services and residents–using the so-called ‘quadruple helix’ model. Through their community-led research, the CIPs demonstrated how creative co-production can tackle issues ranging from mental health and social isolation to heritage conservation and youth engagement, ultimately building more inclusive and resilient communities.
The 2025-6 cohort of CIPs build on that strong foundation. They will generate vital new knowledge about co-creation and the unique role played by their communities and partnerships in growth through new research, development and innovation (RD&I).
Between them, the six CIPs will transform empty retail spaces into creative hubs in Dundee; foster reconciliation in Belfast through a co-created community art exhibition; strengthen community cohesion through craft in Rochdale; address cultural health and creating cultural planning across Kirklees; support cultural regeneration in Digbeth and inspire new forms of collective storytelling in Cardiff.
Democratising research outputs
With UK Government Missions focused on addressing regional inequality and economic growth, there’s growing recognition that top-down policy interventions have limited effectiveness. The CIP Awards directly address this by generating evidence from the ground up, with communities defining both problems and solutions.
This approach aligns with broader shifts in policy thinking. The recent emphasis on place-based innovation across government departments reflects a growing understanding that place really matters—that solutions appropriate for, say, Manchester might fail spectacularly in Dundee, not because of implementation failures but because they were never designed with local lived experience and landscapes in mind.
When it comes to democratising research funding and carrying out co-creation, significant obstacles remain. The promotion criteria in universities still heavily favour traditional academic outputs over community impact. REF panels, despite rhetorical commitments to broader impact, struggle to assess research where communities are co-creators rather than case studies, and funding timelines often clash with the slow work of building genuine partnerships.
The CIP Awards attempt to address some of these structural barriers by providing dedicated funding for relationship-building and requiring evidence of community partnership from the application stage. But systemic change will require broader cultural shifts.
A model for the future
Early indicators from Creative Communities research are promising. Projects have influenced everything from devolved government manifestos, to UNESCO heritage policies and NHS approaches to community health. But scaling this impact requires moving beyond individual projects to a wider systemic change of who gets to do RD&I.
The CIP Awards represent more than a funding opportunity: they’re a prototype for what research looks like when we take community expertise seriously. In an era of declining trust in institutions and growing demands for research relevance, this approach offers a path toward more democratic, more impactful, and ultimately more valuable knowledge creation that is truly by all, and for all.
The Creative Communities podcast is available online CIP Podcast – Creative Communities. You can read more about the work of AHRC Creative Communities on the website, where you can access the case studies and policy papers from the 2023-24 CIPs.
