CONNECTORS WORKSHOP 2025

The Connectors Workshop 2025 was a three-day convening held at Science Gallery Bengaluru, India, from 29 to 31 October 2025. Supported by Wellcome, Eh!Woza, and Mesh, it marked the second iteration of a growing global initiative to build a Community of Practice for those working at the intersection of health research and community engagement in the Global South.

Building on the inaugural convening in Cape Town (2022), the Bengaluru workshop brought together around 60 practitioners, researchers, funders, artists, and community advocates from South Asia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Rather than following a conventional conference format, it was designed as a participant-led, practitioner-driven space that prioritised dialogue, reflection, and horizontal learning.

Within this space, the role of the "Connector" emerged not merely as a functional bridge between research and communities, but as a critical, often unrecognised actor navigating power, translation, and trust across these worlds. This framing set up a central thread of the workshop: a critical interrogation of "meaningful community engagement." Participants examined how the term has often become diluted in institutional settings, surfacing tensions around extractive research practices, tokenistic participation, and unequal ownership of knowledge. These tensions came through strongly in discussions that challenged the "feeding tube" model of research—where knowledge and standards flow unidirectionally from Global North to Global South—and in reflections on structures like Community Advisory Boards (CABs), which were questioned as being at risk of becoming procedural "checkboxes" rather than genuine spaces of power-sharing.

Taken together, the workshop reinforced the ethos of the Connectors initiative while expanding its reach and deepening the diversity of its discussions.

Read the full report

This report documents the discussions, reflections, and insights that emerged over the three days of the Connectors Workshop 2025. It captures the voices of practitioners, researchers, funders, and community advocates who gathered in Bengaluru to examine what meaningful community engagement looks like in practice, and what it will take to sustain the Connectors Community of Practice going forward.