Wellcome Connecting Science’s mission is to enable everyone to explore genomic science and its impact on research, health and society.

The 21^st century is the age of genomics and brings unprecedented opportunities and responsibilities to the fields of learning and engagement, every bit as much as it does for research and innovation. At the heart of all these matters is scale – because genomics will ultimately affect all of us in some way, our learning, engagement and dialogue tools must be interdisciplinary, adaptable, and scalable across diverse audiences.

As a programme, we have three core objectives:

• Collaborate with diverse communities to transform engagement with genomics.
• Impact careers, practice, and policy.
• Through our work establish the Wellcome Genome Campus as the recognised centre of excellence for learning and engagement with genomics.

These three objectives are underpinned by a six specific goals, and six diversity and inclusion commitments, which collectively provide us with our strategic framework.

• Support and accelerate global research by providing innovative skills development and knowledge sharing activities.
• Develop global capacity in genomics; working through partnership and collaboration, to engage under-served audiences.
• Contribute to the development of genomic medicine through the provision of education and training to clinicians and healthcare professionals.
• Enhance and evolve societal awareness of genomics and the ethics of science globally, including diverse communities.
• Enable the inclusion of societal perspectives as part of research and policy development.
• Influence and improve learning experiences and career development for students and educators.

Diversity and inclusion commitments:

Our mission and objectives have largely been developed to be inclusive by default, working on the assumption that the ‘everyone’ we are aiming to reach can access and benefit from our projects in an equitable manner. While initiatives had been developed to address equity in specific, defined areas, in 2021 we developed a new set of commitments in relation to the impacts that Connecting Science aims to deliver.

• We will actively seek to ensure that our activities reach Black, and other BAME and marginalised groups in the UK.
• We will ensure that our public facing activities include and reflect Black, and other minority voices, and audiences, while recognising the trauma and challenge that this may bring for some.
• We will ensure that our professional-facing activities acknowledge structural inequality in the UK, and actively include and promote the participation of both current, and the next generation, of Black and BAME healthcare and research professionals in training and learning activities.
• Working collaboratively, we will strive to make our activities with global communities inclusive, increase awareness and understanding of research inequality between the Global North and South, and address specific barriers to both participating in, and benefiting from, research.
• We will review our governance, management, staff engagement, and recruitment, to identify areas to improve inclusion and representation, creating defined plans for change where needed.
• We will work with colleagues within GRL and across the wider Campus to develop and implement measures which create an inclusive working environment.

We capture, monitor and assess our activities and impacts in a number of ways. A snapshot of  these can be found in our annual review.