Our co-founder and dear colleague, the late John Ord who sadly passed away in November 2021, was from Liverpool, where he claimed he first learnt the three ‘R’s – resistance, resilience and realisation. He believed that the key to realisation is a commitment to a radical education that frees the mind, explains the world through knowledge and offers a different vision of how things might be; an education unshackled from social class and privilege. Hence his commitment to our community-based research which is clearly focused on an open and participatory approach and the generation of knowledge powerful enough to make for real change and for social justice.