Co-Lab

The Centre for Community Research and Improvement

About Us

Community Research and Improvement

Co-lab provides evaluations, training and research methods for community-based research and improvement.

Our mission is to work with health, social and community partners to create community-based evidence that is accessible, responsive, and relevant.

WHAT WE DO

We work with you to design a research or evaluation project.
We provide full project management support from design, data collection, analysis and dissemination.
We report on a regular basis to ensure on-going learning and change.
We support you, your team and those who use your services to jointly use the learning to make improvements.

We offer training and skills development in pragmatic research and evaluation methods.
We will facilitate and coach teams who would like to run their own evaluations so that learning is applied.
We can offer an advisory and consultancy service on the most appropriate methods and approaches for your project.

Working with our partners at UCL's Rapid Research Evaluation and Appraisal Lab we are constantly working to develop and test new methods and infrastructure to make it easier to generate evidence that can be used and applied.
We actively promote and advocate for community-based and community-led research and evaluation.
We run a peer research co-production academy building capacity and resources within communities.

WHAT WE DO

We work within community, health and care settings.
We use rapid evaluation techniques; these highlight issues that matter and that can be used to change quickly (often weeks or months).
We share learning and outcomes in ways that are easy to read and understand; we have a dedicated design team who help us ensure information is as user-friendly as possible.
We train you and others in the evaluation methods we use; this means you can understand what we are doing and why, as well as use these skills in the future.
We like for those who use your services (including your own team members) to be part of our project group; we love the peer researcher model, and recognise how important co-producing learning and improvement can be.