Building Better Evidence Together: Meet the JRF Insight Infrastructure Team

Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)

We're delighted to be joining the Poverty Research & Advocacy Network (PRAN) and sharing regular updates about our work with members over the coming months. As this is our first contribution, we thought we'd start by introducing ourselves and explaining a little about what we do.

We are the Insight Infrastructure team at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), an independent social change organisation working to tackle poverty and social inequality across the UK. At JRF, we know that tackling poverty requires good evidence as well as good ideas and effective action. That's why our work is organised across three areas: developing policy solutions, building support for change, and strengthening the evidence and insight that sits behind both. The Insight Infrastructure team sits within this third area, working to improve how poverty-related data, research and lived experience insights are collected, shared and used across the sector.

We were established because we recognised a challenge facing many organisations working on poverty. Valuable data and insights exist in lots of different places, but they are often difficult to access, connect and use. At the same time, there are still significant gaps in our understanding, particularly where people's lived experiences are missing from the evidence base.

Our role is to help build stronger foundations for poverty research and advocacy by making high-quality data, evidence and lived experience easier to find, share and act on. When we talk about data, we don't just mean statistics. We also mean qualitative evidence and lived experience that help us understand what poverty looks and feels like in people's everyday lives. That is why we set up ‘Grounded Voices’, a rolling programme of research that makes sure we bring lived and experiential insight into JRF’s work, helping to ensure that people struggling to afford what they need can shape the conversations and decisions that affect them. 

A big part of our work is about partnership. We believe that no single organisation can build the full picture of poverty and inequality on its own. Charities, researchers, campaigners, policymakers and community organisations all hold valuable knowledge. By connecting these insights, sharing learning and developing common approaches, we can create stronger evidence and ultimately make a stronger case for change. That's why we're particularly excited to be working with PRAN and joining a network that brings together people who care deeply about understanding and addressing poverty, and who recognise the importance of sharing evidence, learning from one another and strengthening collective impact.

Over the coming months, we'll use these updates to share further information about our new and existing projects, emerging insights, opportunities for collaboration, events and learning from across our work. This includes exploring new sources of poverty data, improving understanding of data gaps, supporting data sharing across the sector, and ensuring lived experience remains at the heart of how poverty is understood and addressed.

We are excited to be planning a conference in spring 2027 to explore how people and communities can shape, own and act on the evidence about their lives. We'll explore two connected strands. Voice is about strengthening qualitative research, so that people's experiences shape decisions. Power is about democratising data so that communities can use it to make change themselves. We’re in the early days of programme curation, gathering ideas and proposals. We've just opened the ‘call for ideas’ to get proposals both from people who want to present themselves and from those who’ve got ideas they’d like to hear about from others. 

It's open until Monday 19 October 2026 and the form is here if you would like to contribute ideas: https://update.jrf.org.uk/p/7ADY-OYZ/conference-open-call 

We're looking forward to getting to know the PRAN community better and learning from the wealth of expertise that exists across the network. Together, we have an opportunity to build a richer, more connected evidence base that can help drive meaningful change.