Frequently Asked Questions

What is Health in the Margins?

Health in the Margins CIC is a new London-based Community Interest Company and social enterprise working to advance health equity by recentring subjugated knowledge systems and practices in global health action. We work by and for frontline communities to document, elevate, and mobilise lived experience, ancestral knowledge, and healing traditions.

What problem are you addressing?

Frontline communities experience the most immediate and severe impacts of structural violence, environmental degradation, infectious disease, poverty, and inequitable healthcare systems. Knowledge, practices, and leadership are often excluded from mainstream health research and policy, a phenomenon known as epistemicide. This leads to unresponsive health systems that reinforce health inequities.

What is epistemicide and why does it matter?

Epistemicide is the systematic silencing, devaluation, or destruction of a knowledge system. In health, it appears as dismissal of traditional healing, erasure of community-based disease knowledge, and privileging biomedical models over social determinants. It produces systems that fail to meet the needs of all populations and widen health inequities.

What is epistemic justice?

Epistemic justice is the right of every community to generate, legitimise, and value its own knowledge systems. For us, it means frontline communities are not just included, but centred in defining what counts as valid knowledge and in leading health action.

How do you centre communities?

We practise what we call of, by and for community work.

• Of: leadership and core team are from frontline communities, so lived experience shapes strategy and priorities.
• By: research, programmes and events are co-designed with community members using participatory methods.
• For: we put the interests of those most impacted by health injustice first.

In practice this includes community-led research, intergenerational healing circles, collaboratively designed health programmes, and policy advocacy grounded in community knowledge systems.

How is your approach unique?

Unlike many global health initiatives that extract knowledge or treat communities as beneficiaries, Health in the Margins is rooted in epistemic disobedience: resisting exclusionary systems and reclaiming ways of knowing.

We do not add community knowledge as an afterthought; we start from it. We document and elevate subjugated practices, build platforms for frontline leadership, disrupt extractive models, and forge alliances across health justice and decolonisation movements.

Who do you work with?

We focus on frontline communities facing epistemic injustice in the UK and globally. Frontline communities are those who experience the most immediate and severe health impacts, are often targeted or neglected by dominant systems, and hold subjugated knowledge systems including indigenous medicine, traditional healing, and community care practices.

What kinds of activities do you run?

• Intergenerational healing circles with frontline communities.
• Community-led research and education to document and share knowledge.
• Co-designed health initiatives rooted in lived experience.
• Policy and advocacy work to shift systems towards epistemic justice.

How can I get involved?

We welcome collaborators, funders, volunteers, and community members who share these values. Email connect@healthinthemargins.org to discuss partnerships, support, or participation in upcoming activities.