Community Engagement, Consultation & Lived Experience Research
Helping organisations better understand the communities they serve through meaningful community engagement, translating lived experiences into practical insights that inform more culturally responsive, evidence-informed services, policies, and practice.
At East and Southeast Asian Scotland (ESAS), we specialise in designing and delivering culturally informed community engagement, consultation, and lived experience research with East and Southeast Asian communities across Scotland and the wider UK.
Our work helps organisations move beyond assumptions and engage directly with the communities they serve through trusted, ethical, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed approaches. Using robust qualitative research methodologies, we translate lived experiences into practical, accessible insights that help organisations better understand community needs, priorities, and experiences.
Whether you are developing a new service, evaluating an existing programme, designing policy, or seeking to strengthen engagement with East and Southeast Asian communities, ESAS can support you to gather meaningful evidence that informs service delivery, organisational learning, strategic planning, and decision-making.
This service is particularly suited to organisations wishing to:
Better understand the communities they serve
Develop more culturally responsive services
Gather lived experience evidence
Evaluate programmes and services
Inform policy and strategic planning
Engage underrepresented communities
Co-design services with communities
Strengthen organisational learning and practice
❋ Who Is This Service For? Every engagement project is designed around your objectives and tailored to the communities you wish to engage.
Our services include:
Community consultation
Lived experience research
Focus groups and facilitated discussion groups
Community listening sessions
Qualitative interviews
Ethnographic and participatory research
Community needs assessments
Co-design workshops
Stakeholder engagement
Strategic consultation
Community insight and evaluation
Thematic analysis
❋ What We Offer Meaningful engagement requires more than consultation.
It requires trust, cultural understanding, robust qualitative methodologies, and the ability to interpret lived experiences within their wider social, cultural, and structural context.
ESAS combines long-standing relationships with East and Southeast Asian communities, multidisciplinary research expertise, and practical experience supporting statutory services, public bodies, charities, researchers, and academic institutions.
Our role is to bridge the gap between community voice and organisational understanding, helping organisations better understand the people they serve and translating community insight into meaningful learning that informs services, policies, and practice.
❋ Why Work With ESAS? 
Our multidisciplinary team combines expertise in both qualitative research methodologies and community engagement.
Research & Engagement
Community engagement and consultation
Social anthropology
Sociology
Social psychology
Qualitative research
Participatory research
Ethnographic fieldwork
Focus group facilitation
Community listening methodologies
Community consultation
Lived experience research
Co-design and stakeholder engagement
Thematic analysis
Community insight and evaluation
❋ Our Expertise ❋ Community Knowledge ❋East and Southeast Asian migration
Vietnamese communities
Hong Kong BN(O) communities
Community development
Cultural competency
Trauma-informed approaches to engagement
Safeguarding and ethical community practice
Our work is grounded in long-term relationship building with East and Southeast Asian communities, enabling us to understand not only what people experience, but why they experience it and how those experiences can be communicated in ways that are meaningful and useful for organisations.
❋ Commissioning ESAS ❋
Every project begins with understanding your objectives before recommending the most appropriate engagement approach. As every organisation, service, and community is different, we tailor our methodologies to the context, scope, and intended outcomes of each project.
Step 1 – Initial Enquiry (Free)
Email us at: info@esascotland.org
To get started, please email us with a brief overview of your organisation, the community or communities you wish to engage, and what you hope to achieve. This helps us understand your enquiry and determinewhether ESAS is the most appropriate organisation to support your project.
If appropriate, we will arrange a free 15–30 minute introductory meeting to discuss your objectives, answer any initial questions, and explain how our services may support your organisation.
Please note: The introductory meeting is an initial conversation only and does not include project planning, consultancy, methodological advice, or recommendations.
Step 2 – Initial Scoping Consultation (Chargeable)
£150 | 1–1.5 hour online consultation
Once we have established that our services are the right fit, we will arrange a paid scoping consultation with one of our Research & Community Engagement Consultants.
This marks the beginning of our commissioned consultancy work and involves specialist professional time dedicated to understanding your project in depth and identifying the most appropriate engagementapproach.
Together we will explore:
Your project aims and objectives
The communities you wish to engage
Existing knowledge, challenges, and evidence gaps
Desired outcomes and intended use of the findings
Appropriate engagement and research methodologies
Ethical, safeguarding, and cultural considerations
Indicative project scope, timeline, and delivery approach
Step 3 – Tailored Engagement Framework & Proposal (Chargeable)
Following the scoping consultation, we will prepare a bespoke proposal outlining:
Recommended engagement methodology
Project framework and delivery plan
Timeline and key milestones
Outputs and deliverables
Staffing and expertise
Project costs and budget
Terms of agreement
Every proposal is bespoke and reflects the scale, complexity, methodology, and intended outcomes of your project.
As this proposal is tailored specifically to your organisation, it forms part of our commissioned consultancy work. Any fees associated with preparing a detailed engagement framework or project proposal will be discussed and agreed during the scoping consultation.
Outputs & Deliverables
Every project is different, and we work with you to determine the most appropriate outputs based on your objectives, audience, and intended use of the findings.
Rather than offering standardised reports, we translate community engagement and lived experience into practical, accessible outputs that support organisational learning, service development, policy design, and strategic decision-making.
Depending on your project, deliverables may include:
Community Insight Reports
Executive Summaries
Strategic Briefings
Community Needs Assessments
Service Evaluation Reports
Thematic Analysis
Community Consultation Summaries
Presentations and Stakeholder Briefings
Co-design and Reflection Workshops
Research Briefings
Bespoke outputs tailored to your organisation
Our Approach
Our role is not simply to gather information, but to help organisations make sense of it.
We translate complex lived experiences into clear, meaningful, and evidence-informed insights that help organisations better understand the communities they serve. Rather than making operational recommendations, we provide contextual understanding and thematic analysis that organisations can incorporate into their own professional judgement, service planning, policy development, and strategic decision-making.
Our aim is to equip organisations with deeper understanding and meaningful insight that supports more informed, culturally responsive decision-making.
Our services have relevance across a wide range of sectors, including:
NHS Boards and Health & Social Care Partnerships
Scottish Prison Service
Scottish Government and Executive Agencies
Local Authorities
Universities and Research Institutes
Charities and Third Sector Organisations
Community Planning Partnerships
Arts and Cultural Organisations
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Teams
Other public bodies Whether you're seeking to understand community experiences, evaluate an existing service, design a new programme, or strengthen organisational practice, ESAS can help you meaningfully engage with East and Southeast Asian communities and translate lived experiences into evidence that informs better decisions. ❋ Building Better Services Together ❋
❋ Who we work with ❋
❋ Partnership Opportunities❋
We can support organisations through: Commissioned consultancy, Community engagement, partnerships, Collaborative research, Service evaluation, Co-design projects, Joint funding applications, Pilot programmes.
Where there is a shared commitment to improving outcomes for East and Southeast Asian communities, we welcome opportunities to work in partnership or develop collaborative funding applications with statutory services, universities, charities, public bodies, and community organisations. Experience
Our work has supported service design, community engagement, policy development, and qualitative research across Scotland and the wider UK.
Vietnamese Community Engagement
Since 2020, ESAS has developed long-term trusted relationships with Vietnamese communities across Scotland through women's groups, community consultations, advocacy, and casework. This engagement has generated valuable insight into migration experiences, digital access, food security, labour exploitation, healthcare access, employment, family life, language barriers, social isolation, discrimination, and community wellbeing, helping inform our advocacy, programmes, community engagement strategies, and partnerships.
COSLA Hong Kong BN(O) Integration Project
Working alongside COSLA and local authority partners, ESAS designed and delivered community consultation with Hong Kong BN(O) communities across Scotland to better understand settlement experiences, integration needs, barriers to accessing services, and community priorities. Findings helped inform more culturally responsive approaches to supporting newly arrived Hong Kong residents.
East and Southeast Asian Migration Alliance UK (EMAUK)
As the Scottish partner within the East and Southeast Asian Migration Alliance UK (EMAUK), ESAS designed and facilitated community engagement with East and Southeast Asian migrant workers across Scotland. Through focus groups, listening sessions, and participatory engagement, we explored labour rights, migration experiences, exploitation, and barriers to accessing support. Findings contributed to national evidence gathering, advocacy, and policy discussions on migrant justice and labour rights.
On Your Side
ESAS played a key role in informing the development of the On Your Side hate incident reporting and support service by contributing community knowledge, lived experience, and consultation with East and Southeast Asian communities. Our expertise helped shape approaches to community engagement, accessibility, and culturally responsive service design, ensuring the service reflected the experiences, priorities, and barriers identified through our longstanding work with ESEA communities.
Community Advocacy & Casework
Our direct work supporting East and Southeast Asian individuals and families experiencing discrimination, safeguarding concerns, housing issues, labour exploitation, hate incidents, and barriers to accessing public services provides an ongoing source of community insight. These lived experiences continue to strengthen our understanding of systemic issues and support organisations seeking to design more equitable, culturally responsive services.
