Home

Wellcome Collection Strategic Approach: Access, Diversity and Inclusion 2025–2028

What’s on this page

The purpose of an Access, Diversity and Inclusion Approach

This strategic approach is intended to offer clarity and guidance into how Wellcome Collection’s Access, Diversity and Inclusion team fosters embedded, sustainable, inclusive and accessible practice that supports Wellcome’s pursuit of health equity.

What we hope to achieve

Wellcome Collection confidently embeds equity practices when working towards creating a world where everyone’s experience of health matters.  

Context of Access, Diversity and Inclusion at Wellcome

Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library exploring health and human experience, which has recently introduced a ten-year strategy and its vision of a world where everyone’s experience of health matters. 

Our mission sets out how we will work to achieve our vision over the next ten years we will:  

  • Seek out opportunities for everyone to contribute different forms of knowledge and understanding towards a healthier and more equitable future.  
  • Give voice to a radical imagination of what health is and what it could be.  
  • Make meaningful connections between different perspectives and stories of health past, present and future, with the collections at the heart.  

Equity Framework

Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation that supports science to build a healthier future for everyone. This vision is underpinned by an equity framework that articulates; that to achieve this vision, we must drive equitable outcomes. And so, to drive equitable health outcomes Wellcome will advance inclusive practices that broaden the range of people leading, participating in and benefiting from science.  

The methods of achieving this are: 

  • To engage people, with the aim that a diversity of people and perspectives influence and contribute to Wellcome Work 
  • Enable and invest in research, with the aim that Wellcome supported discoveries and solutions for urgent health challenges, contribute to more equitable health outcomes 
  • Influencing changes, with the aim that Wellcome’s influence on policy, practice and research systems is delivering the greatest impact in the communities most affected 

This approach will outline how Wellcome Collection’s equitable practices will enable us to deliver these visions  

Throughout this document we will refer to Wellcome Collection strategy, the five-year business plan and the Equity framework.

Overview of approach

Aim: to ensure Wellcome Collection confidently embeds equity practices when working towards creating a world where everyone’s experience of health matters. 

Equitable research as museum and library practice

  • As a public building we offer a space where the public can engage in rich research about health and the human experience in an inclusive and accessible manner.  
  • Wellcome Collection invests in transdisciplinary research that enable specific experiences and objects to be used to explore more universal ideas. 
  • By holding not only Henry Wellcome’s collection, but Wellcome Trust’s business archives, we are encouraged to think about the context of health inequities we are addressing today. Recognizing and critically engaging with the impact of historical ideas and structures on some of our continued ways of working. 
  • Research as a creative practice, encourages us to imagine the future we are trying to create. Through participatory practice with the museum and library, those most affected by the narratives we hold, can influence change in how these issues may be addressed and understood by others.    

Principles that drive this work

  1. Dignity, Safety, Clarity  
  2. Imagination, Communal Care 
  3. Equity, Agency 

Key areas of practice

Equitable practice development

Approaches to inclusive work require continued learning and development across disciplines, enriched by useful, accessible resources to support this work.  

Accountability

Equity work requires a level of internal and external accountability; this needs to be thoughtful mechanisms that empower timely and effective opportunities to challenge and support our work. At the core of this will be how we understand intended impact of our work and how we measure and communicate change. 

Advocacy and influence

Equity work advocates for continuous change, improvements and refinements. Work largely beyond the control of the AD&I team. Our role requires continued research to offer timely insights so we can advocate for the most inclusive approaches. 

Modes of working

Knowledge sharing and development

Programme of practice development, up to date advice and insights, coaching and facilitated explorations.  

Clear communication

Creating useful and accessible resources alongside consistent internal communication in multiple formats.

Ethical evaluation monitoring and insights

Using data and insights to underpin AD&I work including evaluating interventions to see if they achieved intended aims, seeking to understand communities most affected and their articulated needs.  

Incubation

Support colleagues to move from ideas to actions through pilot projects which test inclusive interventions. This includes facilitating collaborative, creative practices and collaborative active research with internal and external stakeholders.

The principles and practice

Why principles?

Principles are embedded to support our day-to-day practice and how we can make decisions when new challenges and opportunities arise.

These help to prioritise work. Equity work can be all encompassing and so choosing when to act and when to wait can be one of the most difficult tasks.

These principles are grouped and prioritised with the belief that these need to happen in a set order to make sustainable change:

  • First, we meet needs of dignity and safety through clarity.
  • Then we strive toward creating the environment for radical imagination and communal care.
  • Ultimately, we want people to feel agency through equity.

Dignity, safety and clarity

In the effective pursuit of equity, we must first understand, acknowledge and seek to immediately mitigate the inequities at play between Wellcome Collection and those who experience the museums activities. Thoughtfully addressing the inequities of our built environments, our ways of working and access to information will allow us to work in physically and psychologically safe ways, where our dignity, and the dignity of all who engage with us, is protected and preserved.

Radical imagination and communal care

Beyond the immediate rectification of any urgent harm, we will need to work in meaningful collaboration to imagine the future we wish to create. Where we can honour expertise shared and understand the systemic problems we are trying to face. This work is creative and emotionally laden. This is transformative work that requires radical reimaginations of the systems, spaces and practices we currently have in place. To do so inclusively this requires collective communal care. Where we acknowledge the labour, our staff are undertaking, the vulnerabilities they are asked to have regarding their practices and positionality, as well as the vulnerabilities and care for and from those we work with outside the organisation.

Equity and agency

This foundation of safety, communal care and radical imagination offers the stable ground upon which we can be brave and make substantial shifts towards equitable relationships, redistribution of power and sense of ownership. An equitable approach will mean a deep understanding of the issues being faced, the needs of those most affected, and ways of working that enable those most affected to meaningfully lead or support work that will bring us closer to a world where everyone’s experiences of health matters.

Areas of practice

To focus on achieving equitable practice across the multiple museum and library functions, the Access, Diversity and Inclusion team will focus on:  

  • Equitable practice development: How to support Wellcome Collection Colleagues varied practices to embed equity.
  • Advocacy and influence: How to equip Wellcome Collection Colleagues with the information, insights and approaches to help them make change in own work or seek change from others.
  • Accountability: How to help Wellcome Collection colleagues articulate equitable intentions, ownership, responsibility and accountability in an ethical and equitable manner.

Priorities 2025–2028  

Over the next three years the AD&I team will support Wellcome Collection teams work through the 12 Strategic Actions while embedding equity in their work. We will continue to lead research and connective work that helps us to realise the equity framework within the museum and library.

Some key outcomes will be:

  • An equitable practice development approach that evolves the Social Justice Curriculum and aligns with the equity framework, and organisation-wide needs.
  • Increase confidence across Wellcome Collection in equity work, with more transparency in this practice and an understanding of its strategic alignment.
  • Agreed understanding of who we are working for and with and how we partner in an equitable manner that enables meaningful contributions.
  • Refined approaches to how we use our spaces (digital and physical) to further equitable aims, including the balance of social and commercial purposes.
  • Developing accessible approaches to using and managing our collections that support people with lived experiences and cultural connection to collections to be instrumental in how we manage and share these narratives, considering this in local and global contexts.
  • Having the ability to share the story of our intentions, outcomes and the impact of equity work at Wellcome Collection. This will showcase how we are working towards our vison, using data from an ethical evaluation and monitoring approach.

Case study: Applying AD&I approach 

1880 THAT! Christine Sum Kim and Thomas Mader, April 2025 

Principles: Dignity, safety and clarity

Knowing we would like to see an increase of deaf and disabled visitors, we needed to ensure that they could access the building in a safe and accessible way. And that those who communicated via sign language, who would be experiencing a narrative discussing the roots of their systematic exclusion from mainstream education, would be treated with dignity.  

Modes: Knowledge development and incubation

We helped teams design and problem solve issues by implementing training or helping to plan and execute ideas to improve access and inclusion. 

Access Diversity and Inclusion team’s role:

  • Equitable practice development: Supporting roles that will engage with the public to develop their awareness of deaf culture and communication skills with deaf visitors; Ensuring in person and online we had BSL translated videos to support understanding of our provisions. 
  • Advocacy: Using exhibition intentions to ensure that Wellcome Facilities teams prioritised upgrading fire alarms to include visual alerts before exhibition opened; Ensuring deaf-led tours were available earlier in the exhibition run to signify that deaf visitors were a priority. 
  • Accountability: Ensuring that we could engage with and measure the impact of this work on our priority audiences, deaf users, by ensuring our survey team from DJS incorporated surveys designed for BSL users.