About me
About Becca
Researcher, community practitioner, and freelance consultant based in Wigan, Greater Manchester.
Who I am
I'm Becca. I'm a researcher and community practitioner, and I've spent the last decade working in and alongside community organisations across the North West of England. I care about the kind of work that happens in communities every day, often without recognition or resource, and I've built my practice around helping that work become visible.
I came to research through community practice, not the other way round. Before I was a researcher, I was someone who worked directly with communities and kept running into the same problem: the people doing the most important work were the least able to prove it. They had the knowledge, the relationships, and the results, but not always the language or the evidence to make the case to the people who held the funding. I wanted to help with that.
That is still what I do. I work with small, grassroots organisations to help them capture and communicate the evidence of their work, in a way that is honest, rigorous, and genuinely useful to them. I am not interested in research that extracts from communities and gives back very little. I want the people I work with to feel that the process was worth their time.
I have recently moved into freelance work and I am actively building my portfolio. I welcome conversations with organisations who are curious about whether research could help them, even if they are not sure yet.
I am also autistic, a parent carer, and a disabled person myself. That is not incidental to the work. It shapes how I think about inclusive and accessible research practice, and it gives me a particular understanding of what it means to work with SEND and disability-led community organisations. I know from the inside how it feels when research does not reflect your reality, and that matters to how I work.
Qualifications
PhD (passed viva, minor corrections in progress)
University of Lancashire
MSc
History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
Research background
- Qualitative and mixed methods social research
- Health and public health research
- Community-led and participatory research
- Co-production
- Historical and archival research
Based in
Wigan, Greater Manchester. I work across the North West and am open to projects further afield where the work can be done remotely or where travel is feasible.
Why I work this way
Research that gives back
I have seen what happens when research is done badly in communities. People give their time and their stories, and then nothing changes. The report goes on a shelf. The funder gets what they needed. The community gets very little.
I have also seen what happens when it is done well. When people feel genuinely heard. When the evidence that comes out of a process reflects what they actually said, not a tidied-up version of it. When a community organisation can walk into a funding meeting with something solid in their hands.
That second version is what I am trying to do. It takes longer and it requires more care, but it is the only kind of research I am interested in.
A related project
Parent Carer Research Network
Alongside my freelance work, I run the Parent Carer Research Network: a project that connects parent carers with researchers so that parent carer voices are properly heard in research that concerns them. It sits under my umbrella but operates independently.
Want to work together?
I'm at an early stage of my freelance journey and I genuinely welcome conversations before anything is decided. Get in touch and tell me a little about what you're working on.