Giving Compass' Take:

• Jack Harrington at Wellcome outlines strategies that encourage funding for more inclusive approaches to effective research.

• How does inclusivity make research more valuable? How can you ensure funding supports inclusive research in your issue area? 

• Discover how you can play a role in impactful scientific research.

Most funders say they want to encourage inclusive research leadership, but it isn’t always clear what they have in mind and what actions they’ll take.

In the Humanities and Social science team, we’ve launched two new funding calls – Research Development Awards in Humanities, Social Science and Bioethics and International Exchange Programmes in Humanities, Social Science and Bioethics. For these calls, only half of the assessment criteria focuses on the research that will be done. The rest is about providing evidence of an inclusive leadership structure, and a commitment to the career development of everyone working in the team.

This is important for the researchers hired to work on a project, but it’s also important for all the other staff that can make research projects thrive: project managers, copy-editors, facilitators and artists, to name a few examples. All too often such staff rely on occasional contracts for the minimum amount of time.

By assessing inclusive leadership in our schemes, we hope to give applicants the chance to think in detail about how they could do this creatively. Cutting and pasting a university’s career development or diversity and inclusion policy won’t be enough.

None of this is easy. As Maureen Kelley says: 'It means letting go of rigidly predetermined outcomes, which one might think is nirvana for a humanities and social science project, but can cause a lot of anxiety.'

The schemes are just one way Wellcome is thinking about how to deliver more inclusive approaches to research. We hope they will provide useful lessons about what works, and where we can still do more.

Read the full article about funding a more inclusive research structure by Jack Harrington at Wellcome.