At a co-design workshop I facilitated in Cape Town in 2023, I posed a question to the room. The attendees were scientists and researchers, and they all said, without hesitation, that they wanted more diversity in their networks, their publications, and their convenings. So I asked them: would you be open to non-PhD holders being in the room? To community health workers? Would you be open to village elders or other forms of knowledge that do not arrive with institutional credentials?

It gave them pause. That pause is where I want to start. These were people of good faith who genuinely believed they wanted diversity. And they did, but up to a point. The limit became visible the moment I named what diversity might actually require.

What are we really asking for when we say we want diversity? Are we asking for different bodies, or are we asking for different knowledge? Are we asking for people who look different but think within the same disciplinary frameworks, carry the same credentials, and ask the same kinds of questions? Or are we prepared for the real disruption that comes when you open a room to people whose ways of knowing do not map neatly onto usual categories? If we do not surface these questions before we start building a community, the diversity we invite into the room becomes tokenism. People of color brought in to represent a community they are no longer quite speaking for. Community health workers invited to validate a program already designed. The room might look different but actually, nothing changes if those in the room aren’t ready to change.

That workshop became one of the founding moments for what eventually grew into CSIDNet, a global network for climate-sensitive infectious disease research. When I began co-designing the community after responding to an Expression of Interest by Wellcome Trust to grow a community of practice capable of shifting the geopolitics of who produces and who uses CSID knowledge, I really struggled to figure out how we would convene such a community without just calling together the “usual suspects.”

I knew the “CSID researcher” identity would only be legible to people who already knew what “CSID” was and thought of themselves as CSID researchers. The “researcher” identity concentrates in predictable geographies: such an identity category skews Global North, skews academia, skews toward people already funded by groups like the Wellcome Trust (i.e. they already know how to pitch their work in a funder-legible way). So rather than anchoring the community there, I decided to introduce a third framing alongside “researcher” and “tech practitioner” as categories: the “end user”. A broad category like “end user” opens the door for a lot of diversity of perspective: Community health workers, practitioners running programs in high-burden settings, nonprofits at the intersection of climate and public health, policymakers whose work depends on CSID research but who would never describe themselves as producing it. Landing on the “end user” framing opened the door to many additional forms of expertise beyond CSID research and software development.

Who you bring in to help build the community is who the community gets built for. The people who feel like they shaped something are the people who feel like it belongs to them. This is not a philosophical point; its consequences are very difficult to correct after the fact, because founding members shape the norms, the language, and the implicit expectations of participation in their own image, and that culture compounds in ways a diversity initiative added later simply cannot undo.

I’m proud to say the founding architecture we built for CSIDNet in 2023 has now grown to eight volunteer-led committees and around 80 core members holding active governance roles on rotating mandates. These members include very technical CSID researchers AND grassroots community health workers. Over 45 countries in the so-called global South are represented among the 80 members from across linguistic, cultural, and geographic differences.

None of this begins with a diversity statement. Instead, it begins with a pause. It begins with the willingness to ask not just whether you want diversity, but what the limits of the diversity you are actually prepared for are, and then to build the structural conditions that answer takes you to. The Cape Town room went quiet when I asked about village elders. I think that silence is more productive than most diversity frameworks I have encountered, because it is at least honest about where the real work starts.