The Learning Bowl
LEARNING SERIES
Series Introduction
The Bowl is a quarterly learning series from the Centres for Exchange (CfE) programme, capturing evolving insights, questions, and practices emerging across the network as projects unfold.
The Centres for Exchange is a Wellcome-led initiative exploring how knowledge exchange in health research can be made more equitable, inclusive, and community-led. Building on a prior phase of landscaping and design, Phase Two of CfE (2025–2027) brings together a small group of partner organisations whose work exemplifies elements of this approach. Phase Two is intentionally focused on learning through practice, accompanying organisations as they explore what equitable, community-led knowledge exchange looks like in real-world contexts.
The Bowl reflects CfE’s approach to learning as adaptive, relational, and grounded in practice. Each edition offers a moment of collective pause and synthesis, surfacing what is being learned across projects, how learning is evolving through experience, and how it connects to broader research, funding, and policy ecosystems.
The series is stewarded by the CfE Learning & Evidencing (L&E) partner, working in close collaboration with partner organisations. This stewardship role focuses on guiding and holding space for collective reflection, synthesis, and sense-making, supporting learning to travel across the network and into wider research, funding, and policy ecosystems.
The name comes from a simple but powerful practice introduced by the L&E team during the first learning agenda workshop with the Banyan called the “memory bowl”. At the start of the gathering, the team invited participants to place memories, reflections, and lessons from their journey into a physical bowl. These could be shared openly or anonymously, through the project, to be revisited and added to at each convening. The bowl was not just a vessel; it became a shared space of trust, continuity, and collective ownership, with anyone free to take custodianship.
By calling our quarterly knowledge-sharing outputs The Bowl, we carry forward that same spirit.
How Learning Begins
Reflections from the opening phase of Phase 2 of the Centres for Exchange Project.
When Disruption Enriches Research
Reflections on what happens when participatory principles disrupt the 'business as usual' of research, drawn from the cross-project learning workshops in January and March 2026.