When Sharing Makes Knowledge

The Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), based in Karnataka, India and the Institute of Natural Resources (INR), based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa are working together on one CfE project, which centres questions of how to share knowledge and learning across contexts. At both sites, the teams are working with farming communities and rely on internal knowledge sharing between farmers and stakeholders as a first step. A deceptively simple insight has been emerging from the field: knowledge sharing happens most richly and effectively when people are working together on something.

ATREE has been conducting participatory research in tribal communities in the Karnataka state of India. In partnership with a local organisation, WASSAN, they have been exploring the impact of agricultural interventions on soil, yield, and farming practice. When the team engaged farmers in soil sampling, an activity typically governed by scientific protocols and conducted by researchers alone, farmers demonstrated that they were capable of far more than following the required protocols. When space was made for listening to their insights, they also enriched them. Participant farmers guided the researchers with their extensive local knowledge of the landscape, soil moisture, seasonal changes, and land-use history, providing important context for interpreting soil samples. The process became one of bidirectional learning, as the researchers were guided by the farmers towards richer findings, and the farmers were able to internalise the findings through experience. As Asmi Khushi from ATREE reflected: "Including people at this stage really helped to form the relationships which allowed a lot of knowledge sharing, as opposed to activities that were only dedicated to knowledge sharing."

But a cautionary counterpoint came from INR, working with their partner organisation, Mahlatini, recounting what happened when they brought together farmers from different sites, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, for a day of shared learning, about similar practices. While their aim was to build a space for ongoing knowledge exchange, the farmers they brought together did not meet or share anything after the event. The reason, it turned out, was structural: the farmers who participated were individuals who had self-selected into a project, with no prior relationship to one another. The event had generated energy in the room, but with no relational substrate beneath it, nothing travelled.

The tension between these two experiences is the insight. “Doing together” generates sharing organically, but only where the conditions for genuine relationships already exist or are actively being built. Where those conditions are absent, where people are convened as a group but do not yet function as one, even well-designed sharing activities may not forge relationships. This raises a prior question that knowledge sharing planning rarely addresses. Before we design the exchange itself, we must ask: how do we identify people who can come together as a group to share knowledge? And how do we help build the relationships that make knowledge exchange meaningful?

The Banyan team, which is exploring how knowledge is co-created, transmitted, and adapted within mental health care settings for people with psychosocial disabilities and histories of homelessness, came to the June cross-project workshop, in which organisations share recent learning, with an admission that will resonate across the network: they were “drowning” in insights from their research knowledge sharing workshops.

In addition to observations from a five-day capacity building processes for carers in a new mental health facility site by a lived experience expert, the team had run six workshops with care providers, service users, and researchers working on care in homelessness and psychosocial disability contexts. The workshop topics ranged from bioethics and governance to cyanotype (photographic) art-making and storytelling.

Across all of these engagements, the project team found themselves holding a density of rich, relational, complex knowledge that resisted easy packaging. In these workshops it became evident that the very act of sharing produces some of the most meaningful knowledge in the project.

The cyanotype workshops offer the clearest illustration. Care providers, including frontline workers, social workers, and management staff, were invited to work with photographic printing techniques and natural materials to capture images of objects that represented care for them. What began as individual exercises became collective. Participants shared materials and helped one another arrange their pieces. In doing so they revealed something about how they understood and embodied care that no structured discussion had yet surfaced. The sharing process was not a record of the insight. It was where the insight happened.

This is shaping how The Banyan is approaching knowledge sharing formats. Rather than asking "how do we communicate what we've learned," the team is asking "what forms allow learning to keep happening as it travels?" The answer is plural. A podcast is chosen over video because audio travels on limited bandwidth in ways video cannot. Alongside it: a lived experience zine (booklet), blogs, and, for scholarly audiences, academic writing on the temporal architecture of care. Each format reaches a different layer of the ecosystem.

The Banyan's workshops have also made visible how frontline and management care workers are routinely erased from narratives about care provision, their knowledge unrecognised, their labour uncounted. This is part of what the team’s careful approach to sharing is designed to counter: choosing forms of sharing that allow this knowledge to be recognised on its own terms, rather than flattening lived experience into single-faceted data.

As the projects find insights worth sharing, they are all faced with decisions about how that sharing should be done. This means asking what forms knowledge needs to take to travel - not just to reach people, but genuinely land with them.

For SEARCH, a community-based health research organisation in India with over four decades of experience, the answer has been emerging through close attention to what their communities respond to. SEARCH's CfE project has been exploring what it means to communicate research with people rather than at them.

Much of SEARCH’s work this quarter revolved around the question of how to communicate the organisation’s founding principle of Arogya Swaraj, or people's health in people's hands, to audiences beyond Gadchiroli in Maharashtra, where SEARCH is based. This inquiry is driven by one of their main learning questions: “How can we use storytelling to describe key components of a community research framework grounded in Gandhian principles?”

To answer this question, the team has been leading three complementary activities. The first is the translation of books written by SEARCH's founders Dr. Abhay and Dr. Rani Bang from Marathi into other languages. As Somita Pal from the SEARCH team put it, these books "deserved a wider audience because they contained lessons that go beyond Gadchiroli.They show how knowledge can emerge from communities, how listening can shape research, and how ordinary people can become active participants in solving health problems."

Secondly, the team has begun developing a documentary on SEARCH's forty-year journey, paying careful attention to finding film-makers who went beyond technical skills to demonstrate aligned values, contextual sensitivity, and a willingness to gain understanding by immersive engagement with the communities being represented.

And finally, SEARCH has been running a social media series called Research with the People that translates complex ideas from the organisation's institutional history into short, accessible stories. The social media analytics have confirmed what community experience had long suggested: just how profoundly people connect stories, songs, and real-life accounts. As the SEARCH team reflected: simplifying a message does not mean reducing its depth. Converting archival material, research histories, and long-form institutional knowledge into short narratives often clarifies the core idea, rather than diluting it. Audiences responded more strongly to stories grounded in real experience than to abstract descriptions.

The choice to lead with stories and lived experience is about more than making research more accessible, a theme we began exploring in our first edition of The Bowl. It is also about recognising what forms of knowledge are most useful, most grounded, most likely to be felt, and most capable of prompting action. Through the CfE programme, partner organisations have created space to take that seriously, asking what it would mean to design knowledge sharing processes that centre those forms of knowledge.