The pilot offered a range of grants to community members, including experimental bursaries to fund rest and repair for people who bring lived experience into their culture and systems change work.
“Rest is a form of resistance” - Tricia Hersey
Studio Susegad exists because we want to build ‘spaces of care’ and non-extraction: places and processes where people can thrive, rather than just survive, in the context of extractive and collapsing systems. Alongside those we work with, we aim to practice different ways of doing and being that challenge existing norms and model alternatives. That purpose shaped the Radical Care + Finance Pilot, our collaboration with Wellcome Trust exploring culture change.
Where we began
Across 2024-2026 we were commissioned as the Embedded Social Research Team within the Institutional Research Culture Community (IRCC). The IRCC brought together 42 universities and research institutes to work on some of the most structurally embedded problems in the research sector: inequality, exclusion, job precarity, and the invisibility of certain forms of labour. Early on, meeting the community and hearing their experiences, we saw how many people carried this work as an extension of their own identity and lived experience. We also saw the community reflecting the wider world: structural inequality shaped relationships and ways of working inside it too, despite the common goal of driving more positive research cultures. With no official provision for easing that impact within the community itself, we suggested Wellcome fund a pilot in reparative rest. Together with the community, we wanted to find out what it might look like to resource the people doing justice-oriented work, and not only the work itself, across geographies and within academia.
Every regional event and whole-community convening we ran within the IRCC came with an offer of a reparative rest fee: a concept we detail more fully in our first IRCC report (Asani et al., 2025). There is a lineage to this work: research on resourcing racial justice (Khan and Faizulah, 2024), action research with Rising Arts Agency (Dias and Jackson, 2022; Dias and Safana, 2020), Susegad’s own public events (Dias, Turley and Wong, 2023), and our policy of offering rest fees for marginalised collaborators. In addition, IRCC co-lead Furaha Asani inputted into the Reparative Rest Leave model, developed by Watershed, Bristol. Our enquiry is greatly shaped by Tricia Hersey's writing and events on rest as resistance, which follows the thread between the politics of rest and racial capitalism, and a grind culture that funnels so many of us towards burnout.
Three kinds of bursary were on offer: attendance bursaries for travel and subsistence, open bursaries for any other cost that would make participation possible, and reparative rest bursaries. Our invitation to people around reparative rest talked about how someone with lived experience of discrimination, taking part in research or attending a related event, may be asked to represent that experience to a group, manage the emotional impact of their own encounters with inequality, face a lack of understanding from the people around them, and meet exclusionary behaviour elsewhere that others do not.
We offered £150 towards reparative rest, with no need to cost it out or prove anything. We invited people to self-identify if the bursary applied to them, for reasons including, and not limited to, race, gender expression or disability. We gave examples: working on a project whose themes touch your lived experience; meeting exclusionary behaviour from colleagues, supervisors or participants; finding events in the wider world mentally, physically or emotionally traumatising because of who you are.
We acknowledged that the offer may not be taken up by some people who are eligible because of the way marginalisation and exclusion operates and is internalised, and this is something we tried to mitigate in our communications and address head on in our invitations to the community.
Table showing types of bursaries offered.
What happened
Rest was the most requested bursary type across all four rounds: we had planned for most of the money to cover the practical cost of getting to events which were held across the UK. Instead, of the 88 bursaries we paid out, 46 went to rest, and more than half the money followed. We had designed the scheme with a randomised selection process but we didn’t need this as we were able to meet each applicants’ need and allocate the funds across bursary types.
What people told us
It was important to us that no-one felt obliged to give us feedback after receiving the bursary (more labour), and we made sure we communicated that it was optional, not transactional. In line with regenerative evaluation principles, we collected ongoing feedback and shifted our approach with each round to honour what we heard and improve the offer. We asked for feedback through a short survey and recipients also sent us comments on email and chatted to us in person about what the bursary was enabling, what it was bringing up for them, and where it could be improved.
For some, the bursary supported planned recovery time:
"I felt I could better commit myself to the emotional labour as I knew if I got the bursary I would be able to take some 'down time' as part of my self-care... I took a self-care day to process and be kind to myself."
For others it communicated a recognition of what it takes to be in certain spaces:
"It allowed me to attend, as a neurodivergent individual, and feel like I was being truly compensated for the additional energy I have to give when at a social event with individuals I've not met before."
For some, it highlighted tensions around accountability:
"The bursary provided practical support, but it also communicated that rest and wellbeing are important and should not be treated as something researchers must earn or manage entirely on their own."
What worked
We did bursary call outs via our community newsletter and at any learning and engagement activities in person and online. We proactively invited individuals and teams to apply after hearing them talk about relevant challenges and dynamics and we honoured late applications or changes to applications maintaining a ‘rolling pot’ to be as flexible as possible for the community. We found that colleagues would also signpost the offer between them.
We built the bursary application into the event RSVP form and kept it as stripped back as possible with participants being able to register their event details and apply for all three bursaries in one form. For rest, people only needed to tick a box that they considered themselves eligible. One respondent told us that "proving access needs or disabilities to secure support is a labour-intensive, stressful process which often prevents me from asking." Another said: "I appreciated the 'opt-in, no questions asked' format." A few people reached out for conversations about their eligibility and we talked them through the aims of the bursary and held space for them to reflect as needed, without any pressure. Once we had sent offer letters to people, and they had returned their acceptance letters, we ensured we paid promptly.
What didn’t
We were honest with ourselves and community members about the limits of this pilot. One respondent held the larger picture honestly: "As I applied for the rest bursary, it felt more like a coping mechanism for a broken system and working with individuals not literate in anti-racist practice, rather than a solution." Another wrote that "we need to do more work towards taking away the taboo of talking about this", because they didn't feel open enough to speak about it with their colleagues. Both of these comments highlight the tensions at the heart of this work: rest offered inside the structures of grind culture is but one, tiny intervention.
Why we tried
We do iterative and prefigurative work, modelling something different so it stops feeling hypothetical and starts feeling possible: if we don’t try, what will change? We look to adrienne maree brown’s writing on fractals (brown, 2017) to ground this approach. Start small, because the way we do one thing is the way we do all things, and know that patterns repeat: what we practise at a small scale shapes what grows at a larger one.
Our hope is that although small, this pilot demonstrates a model that gets people reflecting on, talking about, and experiencing reparative rest in settings where this is largely absent. We want this offer to become standard practice across sectors: a budget line built in from the start of any programme that brings marginalised people into rooms to do this kind of work. The administration is manageable, the cost is modest, and the impact, as our respondents described it, is meaningful.
During the pilot, at least two institutions within the IRCC began exploring how to adapt the scheme, including how annual leave buy-in schemes might build rest days into researchers' contracts directly. That's what we were hoping for: that seeing it done, at a funder's invitation, inside a mainstream programme, would give other organisations both permission and a place to start.
Over two years and four rounds, we settled on principles we'd carry into any future iteration: make it as simple, flexible, and relational as possible, and we are grateful to Wellcome for backing something untested in their space and for giving us the room to find out what it could do. We're happy to share our process, our application form, and anything we learned. Get in touch at hello@studiosusegad.com.
Discover more in our final IRCC report Conditions for research culture change: Care, Creativity, Connection, and Composting.