Evidence into Action

Over five months, ASF-UK worked with 1to1 – Agency of Engagement and SERI — together with grassroots leadership from the Inner City Federation (ICF) and the Inner City Resource Centre (ICRC) — to turn two years of practice-based findings from earlier Change by Design Johannesburg workshops into accessible tools for communities, journalists, and policymakers. Rather than opening a new phase of research, this was the post-workshop processing stage in full: taking everything gathered across the diagnosis, dreaming, and developing work of 2023–2025 and getting it into the hands of the people best placed to act on it.

The programme ran across three connected strands: grassroots support, media engagement, and policy influence. On the grassroots side, participatory workshops helped community leaders — including ICF and ICRC leadership — translate research findings into practical resources for their own organising and advocacy. The media strand brought journalists into conversation with residents and researchers, working through what fair, accurate reporting on inner-city housing looks like in practice. The policy strand focused on distilling complex findings into concrete, low-cost interventions that decision-makers could act on without working through years of fieldwork first.

The resulting outputs included multilingual audio summaries for wide, low-barrier distribution; a rights-informed media pack; and a policy brief setting out practical, low-cost interventions. Together, they mark a shift in the wider Change by Design Johannesburg initiative — from documenting conditions and gathering evidence, towards putting that evidence directly into circulation among the people positioned to act on it.

Grassroots Workshop