On 6 February 2025, the Institute for Social Justice brought together YSJ academics and staff from the VCSE organisations who are currently collaborating on Community Research Grants (CRG). In this blog post, written by Dr Valeria Guarneros-Meza, the ISJ team reflect on the conversations that took place.
Creating collaborative research
In 2022, the Institute for Social Justice (ISJ) launched the Community Research Grants (CRG) to foster research partnerships between academics and VCSE organisations. Built on the ethos of conducting open and democratic research, these collaborations aim to ensure that research is relevant and impactful.
To help achieve this, the ISJ has been inviting VCSE organisations for the past three years to submit proposals for research on themes that are important to them.
Applications for 2025-2026 CRGs are open to VCSE organisations from 3 Feb to 28 March 2025. See the ‘Apply for a Grant’ page.
We’ve found it valuable to bring the projects together to share insights and learn more about how universities and VCSEs can collaborate. Our discussions in February centred on what impact means to CRG projects and on how to develop pathways to impact derived from such projects.
The event followed structured discussions on enablers and barriers to impact experienced by participants. These discussions prompted project teams to begin thinking or concretising their plans for impact.
How was impact understood by CRG projects
Several participants understood impact as change. A few more comments underlined the need to understand the problem first to develop a desired change. This change could be positive or negative, but there was a tendency between participants to emphasise a positive change in people’s lives; in some instances through innovation.
Change could take many forms from improving services, to generating preventative interventions, to generating opportunities for beneficiaries to ask critical questions. It was recognised that change could happen at different levels: individual, organisational or societal.
Other comments addressed how impact can take less tangible forms such as changing people’s minds as well as creating meaningful encounters between people, whilst sharing perspectives. The discussions also addressed aspects that impact involves, such as long-lasting relationships and the need to be aware that change presents itself in complex ways.
Whilst understandings of impact were shared, characteristics about the quality of impact emerged as well. For example, the size of impact or the scope and reach (number of people) of the CRG projects and the intensity of the change upon people or their organisations.
Comments on measurability were made, from making the problem visible to different stakeholders, to questioning how to capture or measure change in monetary and non-monetary ways. Comments beyond the initial expected change were also raised through questions asking how change could be scaled up and ways in which further funding could be secured. 
Barriers to impact
Participants recognised that the limited amount of time and heavy workloads of project partners and their beneficiaries are a barrier for the implementation of CRG projects and therefore to impact. Although not necessarily a negative aspect, the slow and long-term process of trust and relationship building between VCSE and academic partners could be interpreted as a barrier to the quick results that some stakeholders and grant funders expect.
Awareness of the fragmented nature of the VCSE sector was mentioned as a barrier for developing networks and broadening opportunities for impact.
Staff shortages and staff turnover in both VCSE and academic partners were mentioned as challenges in the implementation of the project and the effects these could have on the potential impact. Organisational rules and regulations were mentioned as another barrier. This included processes such as beneficiaries’ payments when doing participatory action research and the logistics of room hire and venue availability when working with beneficiaries or partners that do not have/own the premises.
The uncertainty of the broader economic and political context in which the partners’ work is embedded has required adaptability and an awareness that change might come fast and unexpectedly. Hence learning to predict barriers and challenges is important. The loneliness of the researcher in a CRG project can sometimes be challenging if a project is comprised by a small team.
The ways policy is set can be a barrier if it is not bespoken to beneficiaries’ needs. Finding a balance between bespoken and generalisable solutions can be tricky. The ideology behind a policy, is for some, another a barrier to their CRG projects as well as the extent to which such projects can have an impact on policymakers.
Limited funding and conditional funding were another barrier mentioned. Closely related to this point was the strong awareness of the fact that impact is defined and determined by power structures. Participants believe that whoever is managing the ‘input’ (money, time) is likely to determine the direction of impact.
Participants underlined that unintentional impacts often occur in these projects. These can be hard to quantify, drawing resources away from the initial scope of the project. This is hard to manage when the unintentional is just as important as the intended ‘outcomes’. 
Enablers to impact
Ensuring that all parties understood each other’s backgrounds is important for the partnership relationship to build pathways to impact. Also, understanding the lived experience of beneficiaries and, in some cases of partners, is primordial in getting the right type of impact.
Partners’ frank discussions, their availability and good communications were mentioned as key to ensure that pathways to impact were enabled throughout the process. An example mentioned of good communication was the establishment from the outset of partners’ roles and responsibilities. Doing the latter in writing was considered helpful by some participants.
The adaptability of partners throughout the collaboration and the processes of building trust, learning and creating new knowledge were all considered enablers to making the intended change achievable.
Creating a narrative story of the process followed by the CRG project and its relationship building was considered as an enabling tool to track the pathways to impact. Finally, taking some manageable risks (‘giving things a go’) were also mentioned as enablers.
Reflections and actions
The afternoon concluded with CRG project teams sketching their plans for impact by paying attention to the inputs, outputs and envisaged outcomes of their projects.
The notes collected by the ISJ team will contribute to the learning history of the CRG scheme. This learning aims to not only identify enablers and barriers to impact, but also to prompt change in the relationships between academics and VCSE partners in terms of the sharing of research and resources to make this aspect of the process an impact priority.
