Community Engagement

What We Do:

• Connect: Foster community-academic partnerships to improve public health and health equity
• Create: Develop respectful, equitable, and mutually beneficial research partnerships
• Advance: Training and development opportunities
• Engage: Community outreach, symposia, capacity building
• Act: Focus on impactful outcomes to achieve social change

What is Community-Engaged Research?

Community-engaged research is “the process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of those people.”[1]
 

Characteristics of Community-Engaged Research 

• Community members and researchers are actively engaged throughout research as authentic partners in response to community-identified priorities, needs, and capacities
• Respect, trust, collaborative leadership, flexibility, and shared decision making
• Findings and knowledge are shared, reciprocal, and benefit all partners
• Researchers and community members recognize each other’s strengths, resources, assets, and expertise in a bidirectional, mutual learning, problem-solving, joint action process
• Core elements include local capacity building, systems development, empowerment and sustainability [2-4]
   

References:

1. CDC, Principles of community engagement, 1997, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Atlanta, GA.
2. Horowitz, C.R., M. Robinson, and S. Seifer, Community-based participatory research from the margin to the mainstream: are researchers prepared? Circulation, 2009. 119(19): p. 2633-2642.
3. Ferr, C.D., et al., The Healthy African American Families (HAAF) project: from community-based participatory research to community-partnered participatory research. Ethnicity & Disease, 2010. 20(1 0 2): p. S2.
4. Jones, L. and K. Wells, Strategies for academic and clinician engagement in community-participatory partnered research. JAMA, 2007. 297(4): p. 407-410.