Who Joined the Gathering?

Our 2025 Community Knowledge Matters Gathering was a wonderful day of connection and conversation. To reflect on our progress, we wanted to share a breakdown of who attended and what these insights indicate about the composition of the CKM network so far.   

A Growing Rural and Island Focus

The majority of attendees (approximately 59%) joined us from rural and island Scotland. This suggests the CKM network is successfully evolving towards a rural and island focus. While the network initially began with a specific focus on the Highlands and Islands and mental wellbeing, as of November 2025, our scope has broadened to foreground rural and island communities across the whole of Scotland. 

Based on registration data, the Gathering brought together a diverse mix of roles:

• 55% identified primarily as community members, organisation members, or third-sector workers.   

• 20% identified as academic researchers.   

• 18% identified as practitioners or students.   

• 6% identified as decision-makers.   

This variety indicates that the network is built on a rich blend of identities and roles within the community-led research landscape.   

Insights From the Day: What Communities Do We Belong To?

At our network events, we like to start by asking people which "hats" they are coming in and which communities they feel part of.   

Communities

On the day, we asked attendees what communities they felt part of, with the option to define ‘community’ as they liked: whether by geography, identity, experience, or interest. The bigger the word in the word cloud, the more frequently it was used. Based on our "check-in" exercise, our attendees had a strong engagement from the following communities: parent, research, rural, female, lived experience, academic, Island, Shetland, Highland, LGBTQ, Scotland, local, recovery, peer, Moray, young people, career, and Orkney.   

While this is a snapshot of one in-person meeting and does not necessarily represent the entire network, it highlights a vibrant and diverse set of groups engaged in our work.   

Community ‘Hats’

To help break down the traditional binary between "communities" and "researchers," we asked participants to what extent they were coming into the Gathering as: community members, people with lived experience, researchers, practitioners, service providers, or decision-makers.   

Crucially, people were able to identify with each of the categories on a scale from ‘don’t identify at all’ to ‘strongly identify’, acknowledging that we often wear multiple hats at once. This whole-self approach encouraged people to move past job titles and engage with others in the room through whatever ‘identity’ felt most appropriate to them at the time.  

Key Takeaways from 2025

The results of this exercise revealed several important themes:

• Centring Community: Most participants identified most strongly as "community members." This aligns with our core mission of centring community perspectives in everything we do.   

• Merging Roles: To a slightly lesser extent, the check-in results show that people identified with the label ‘researcher’ and the perspective of their own ‘lived experience’. This resonates with our belief that no matter our job titles or status in society, we all have lived experience and are all members of a community. It also indicates many community members do see themselves as researchers, supporting our belief that research can be led by communities rather than just taking place in a university.   

• The Decision-Making Gap: Fewer people identified as "decision-makers." This suggests either a specific gap in attendance or that those present did not feel as though they have a large amount of opportunities for decision-making.   

• Experience Levels: Based on registration data, expertise was varied. 27% of attendees had significant experience in community-led research, while 33% had little or no experience at all. The remaining 40% felt they had some experience, suggesting the CKM network includes all levels of learning.   

Looking Forward

The day included a wide range of perspectives, bringing in both individuals who were completely new to community-led research and those who were more experienced. This mix allowed for a rich exchange of peer support and learning. Interestingly, 43.1% of attendees were not yet CKM members at the time of registration. We welcomed this growth, as our Gathering was open to anyone passionate about community-led research, regardless of their prior membership status.   

The 2025 Gathering was a chance to bring together peers from rural and island communities, practitioners, researchers, and policy-makers to connect and share practice. The day brought together diverse voices—from a community, grassroots, and lived experience lens to policy-makers—to explore how community-led research can drive local change and influence national policy.   

Thank you to everyone who made the Gathering such a fruitful and joyful event! We look forward to continuing these collaborative actions as we grow.