Forging partnerships for health equity research: transformative capacity-building for community-academic teams
PMCID: PMC12339544
PMID: 40800020
Abstract
Background Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is essential for translating and increasing the overall uptake of evidence-based interventions in community settings. Yet a limited number of academic and medical institutions provide structured and formal training on how to conduct high-quality CBPR or develop academic-community partnerships. Methods Building upon a capacity-building program, we developed and implemented a year-long academic partnership training program. It consisted of a 2.5-day intensive short course, bimonthly didactic webinars, and year-long mentoring, as well as seed funding. Five dyads of academic researchers from universities in Texas and their community partners completed the program ( n = 10) between May 2023 and May 2024. A mixed methods evaluation via a survey with closed- and open-ended questions was conducted at the end of the 12 months to evaluate satisfaction with the program and impact. Results Nine out of the ten participants reported the program was excellent or very good, and all participants found the mentoring component and didactic sessions to be “transformative.” Participants highlighted the importance of forming close relationships with their partners and other teams, peer mentorship, and having a space to discuss challenges associated with CBPR. Both academic and community participants reported making significant progress on their research projects including local, state and federal conference presentations, applying for and securing grant funding, and submitting peer-reviewed manuscripts. They created tools that were helpful for their community. Discussion Dedicated training in CBPR practices for community practitioners and academics in the same space can build capacity for health equity research and initiatives. Using a combination of didactic and experiential learning opportunities, in addition to peer and formal mentorship, allowed for considerable growth among participants. Importantly, academics developed understanding and interest in community projects, and community members developed interest in research and appreciation for academic institutions. Suggestions for improving the program are also discussed.
Full Text
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is essential for implementing effective health equity initiatives (1). CBPR is an approach to research that intentionally shares power with community partners and involves them in the research process with the goal of greater benefit to the community (2). By fostering collaboration between local community leaders and researchers, CBPR equips community leaders with rigorous academic tools and helps secure funding for scaling up initiatives. At the same time, it enables researchers to align their priorities with those of the community, leverage local knowledge, and engage stakeholders across systems, including residents, practitioners, and policymakers (1). This reciprocal approach compels research to be actionable and enhances its sustainability (2). Despite these compelling reasons for CBPR, the current academic and research enterprises are not adequately incentivized to build and maintain engaged research capacity among researchers, communities or health systems (3). NASEM puts forth several recommendations for improving community engagement research including workforce capacity and training, institutional structures and faculty incentives (1).
Underscoring the need for equitable community engagement is the stark fact that traditional research paradigms (e.g., RCTs in highly controlled settings) in the absence of meaningful community buy-in have failed to significantly reduce health disparities among vulnerable populations (4, 5). Moreover, reviews of existing discoveries demonstrated that it takes approximately 17 years for 14% of original research to translate into public health practice (6). CBPR is one solution for improving the translation of evidence-based practices, as it includes implementation of internal and external processes that are essential for research translation, such as community readiness and fit between innovation and community preferences.
Academic institutions are called to develop the infrastructure for CBPR, yet incorporating community members with lived experience requires meaningful engagement (7). Moreover, there is considerable community distrust for academic and medical institutions due to historical and ongoing harms (8, 9). Clinical and Translational Science Award centers often address these limitations through structured interactions between faculty seeking research input, and community members with lived experience, for example Community Engagement Studios (10, 11). Those programs, though, are meant to include community members as advisors, not as collaborators, in the research. Deeper engagement is needed to position community members as equal partners in the research (7).
There are few notable examples of capacity-building for academic-community collaborators. One program, Engage for Equity, created tools to support community–academic partnerships in strengthening their research processes and outcomes (12). The tools, informed by prior studies conducted by Wallerstein and colleagues (13) aim at guiding (a) reflection about the partnership context and history, (b) planning and evaluation of partnership processes and intervention implementation, (c) strengthening partnership quality, and (d) promising practices. One such tool is the River of Life Reflection, where teams represent their collective partnership journey through artistic expression, identifying accomplishments, turning points, and roadblocks. The activity relies on symbols, drawings, magazine clippings, and any other type of visual representation to use as metaphors for their partnership history and progress. Evaluations of this and the other tools show these tools are feasible and acceptable to participants (12). These tools have been used with hundreds of trainees as part of a summer institute, although it is offered for a fee to participants. While the institute is open to researchers, students, and community members, it is not clear whether the program is intended for teams that have both academics and community members who are committed to working together.
Another exemplary program is the CBPR Partnership Academy (CBPR Academy) conducted by the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center (Detroit URC) since 1995. The CBPR partnership involves eight community-based organizations, two health and human service agencies, and three units at the University of Michigan, aimed at fostering and supporting CBPR partnerships to achieve health equity (14). The year-long CBPR Academy engages cohorts of approximately 12 community-academic teams in a free-of-cost 5-day course focused on (a) describing and understanding partnership formation and maintenance, (b) the use of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods in the context of CBPR studies, (c) the use of mixed methods to evaluate partnership process and outcomes, and (d) dissemination and translation of partnership results (14). Beyond the course, ongoing learning activities include a small planning grant, six online forums with all teams, and individual meetings with a community-academic mentor team over the course of the year. A mixed-method evaluation with two cohorts highlighted that providing modeling and mentoring to teams of community members and their academic partners solidified their partnerships and strengthened their capacity to grow and sustain their initiatives (14).
While the CBPR Collaborative and CBPR webinar series we created were focused on faculty capacity building for CBPR, they did not provide structured opportunities to learn with community partners. Recognizing that learning CBPR is best when it is applied (15), the team envisioned the CAP-HEP program would be for researchers who had established a new partnership, but lacked formal CBPR training, and their community partners. By involving teams of community-academic partners in the early stages of partnership development and engaging them over an extended period, CAP-HEP aimed to strengthen the trust essential to effective academic-community collaborations and to build the capacity of both partners to engage meaningfully in this work. The Detroit URC’s CBPR Academy was a model for CAP-HEP, with the first author having been a fellow of that program in years prior. The third author participated in a training that included the River of Life tool from Engage for Equity.
Planning for CAP-HEP began in the fall of 2022 with bi-monthly meetings focused on the scope of the program and budget, timeline of implementation, marketing and promotion, recruitment and selection of teams, and curriculum development. The team also used planning meetings to identify potential academic and community partners who could serve as training facilitators and co-mentors in the program. We sought input from a Community Strategy Team at our academic unit, composed of six community advocates and leaders whose role is to inform the school on community priorities and initiatives. These leaders gave input on the format of CAP-HEP and assisted with community outreach. Additionally, consultants from the Detroit URC’s CBPR Academy met with the team on a quarterly basis over a two-year period, where insights and materials from their own program were shared. As noted above, the Detroit URC, established in 1995, has a longstanding commitment to CBPR and fostering and supporting the development and sustainability of CBPR partnerships. The Detroit URC has been guided by a decision-making community-academic Board that for the past 30 years has met monthly to shape the Center’s priorities and initiatives. The CBPR Partnership Academy was one of the results of this priority- setting process by the Board and became a focus of their efforts starting in 2014. Both the community and academic partners on the Board played critical, equitable roles in designing the Academy, grant proposal writing, implementing the funded initiative, including serving as instructors, mentors, reviewers of grant proposals, and evaluators (14). Thus, the design and implementation of CAP-HEP in Central Texas was co-created and aligned with the Detroit URC’s CBPR principles from the outset.
From these planning meetings, the CAP-HEP team decided on a 12-month CAP-HEP program that would largely mirror the CBPR Academy and include participation in a short-course, monthly peer mentoring and didactic meetings, one-on-one mentoring, and seed funds for project implementation and/or evaluation (see Figure 1 for a timeline). Packaging the program in this way aimed to foster and pace community-academic trust building, skill acquisition, and successful implementation of collaborative projects.
In the spring of 2023, the CAP-HEP team promoted the program through our division’s community-facing monthly newsletter and a flyer distributed directly to the Community Strategy Team and existing community collaborators. To recruit academic researchers, the CAP-HEP team shared the promotional materials with departments, schools and centers across campus. A virtual informational session was hosted in March for academics and community members interested in learning more about the CAP-HEP program. In April, the CAP-HEP team reviewed applications submitted by nine community-academic teams, selecting five partnership teams who met the following criteria: (a) team was in the early stages of partnership, (b) team had a proposed health equity project that was conceptualized by both the academic and the community partner, (c) team articulated how the CAP-HEP program would support their partnership, and (d) team submitted a commitment letter from their supervisors to optimize their ability to fully participate in the program. The five teams that were selected among the nine applicants, and their background and projects are described in Table 1.
The sessions in the short course consisted of a welcome dinner at a restaurant, experiential learning activities (16), team strategic planning, didactic lectures, and invited panel presentations (Table 2). Experiential learning activities, such as The River of Life (12), a power “construction and deconstruction” activity for faculty using legos, and others, focused on providing a safe environment where participants could explore the values committing them to their partnership, take perspective on their shared and individual journeys, and to encourage agency and promote appreciation for each other (16). Participants also had planning sessions where they could apply key CBPR concepts to their individual projects. Supplementing experiential learning activities and team planning sessions were skill-building didactic lectures on topics, such as photovoice, world cafe conversations, and coalition-building, among others (17–19). Finally, panel discussions featured seasoned community-academic teams and were co-facilitated by academic and community leaders with a strong history of collaboration in the region. Such co-facilitated sessions were intended to demonstrate successful collaborations and their paths, challenges, and opportunities.
Five community-academic partnership teams participated and completed the CAP-HEP program (Table 1). These teams represented
three from the same institution of higher education (i.e., Medical School, College of Liberal Arts, College of Natural Sciences) and one from a different institution of higher education (i.e., Nursing) and
across both institutions (i.e., Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, African and African Diaspora Studies, Human Development and Family Sciences, and Nursing). All academic partners were at the Assistant Professor level. The community organizations served (i.e., individuals with chronic health conditions, Black mothers, BIPOC LGBTQ individuals, older adults and rural residents) and the team projects reflected five
(i.e., gentrification and healthcare access, gender-affirming care, perinatal mental health, rural health, and physical activity for older adults).
Experiential learning has been the hallmark of other community engagement capacity-building programs (2, 12, 16), as it promotes capacity for perspective-taking and vulnerability when working with people of different backgrounds (15). CAP-HEP drew on experiential learning to assist community-academic teams in identifying each partner’s assets and growth areas and reflect and plan for partnership processes more broadly. Experiential activities were mostly taught as part of the short course, and included values exploration and partnership history, partnership planning and expected outcomes, discussion of power dynamics in democratizing research, and separate discussions for academic and community partners about challenges they face in their work environment. For example, faculty engaged in an experiential activity involving legos, where they were instructed to physically construct and represent their place in academia and the communities in which they wish to engage. This is significant because researchers interested in CBPR often face contradictory messages and demands in their academic environments. Our exercise aimed to provide a safe place where they could acknowledge the lack of agency they at times experience in academia due to their area of scholarship, approach to scholarship, or their intersecting identities, while also recognizing the power they have as academics relative to their community partners (20).
Whereas our program mirrored others in its reliance on experiential learning (16), especially as part of the short course, we incorporated a heavy emphasis on skills-building in community engagement and research. We recognized that to carry out a community-based participatory research project successfully, early career faculty in the program needed to build competence in CBPR and mixed-methods, while community leaders could benefit from structured and innovative approaches to engagement and evaluation. Skills-building content requested by teams at the conclusion of the short course, was delivered by our CAP-HEP faculty and staff trainers, who have expertise in community engagement tools such as photovoice, world café conversations, community engagement studios, and others, but who also have extensive experience conducting quantitative and qualitative research as part of collaborative projects with local and regional partners. Participating teams learned through lectures, hands-on application, and by incorporating these methods into their team projects. For example, one team utilized world café conversations to engage older populations, another team conducted photovoice with Black mothers, yet a third team utilized surveys, and the other two conducted focus groups and interviews.
Whereas faculty may have access to research training in their academic setting, our approach to research training is that data collection, whether quantitative or qualitative, is not conducted in a vacuum. That is, data collection that involves engagement and trust-building through community partnership is in the interest of ethical and effective research (21). Moreover, data collection shifts away from an objective examination of a subject that further “makes the research distant from the people” (p. 80), to co-creation of knowledge that humanizes their life experiences, dignifies the person, and builds hope and agency (15). Noteworthy is that participating faculty were in their early career stages, so they had limited training and exposure to these methods in a community context. Similarly, the clinical faculty members had limited research experience, so the benefit of these specific skill-building tools extended to both community and academic team members.
As we plan for future cohorts, we heed this first cohort’s recommendations for improvement. First, we plan to increase skills-based research training offered through CAP-HEP, including basic quantitative and qualitative skills, IRB submissions, as well as more nuanced training in partnership sustainability. Second, although we incorporated equitable practices throughout the CAP-HEP program, such as co-facilitating sessions with community collaborators, having community collaborators as co-mentors, and discussing issues of power in experiential learning activities, ongoing conversations with the teams suggests that more needs to be done to build trust. We attribute this to the historical abuses committed by academic institutions that range from “parachute research” and neglect, extractive language and power dynamics with academics as “knowledge producers” and communities as “knowledge recipients,” to downright deceit and harmful practices (15). While community participants felt empowered by the program and in their partnership, they also described challenges related to time, training location, and financial constraints—factors that reinforced existing inequities. Looking ahead, we plan to address these concerns through both content and process-level changes. For example, we aim to develop new program content that includes deeper conversations about community burden in CBPR, trust-building, and equitable resource sharing. Process-wise, we plan to implement more intentional practices such as forming a dedicated community-academic decision-making board or steering committee and proactively addressing the financial and time burdens placed on community members. These actions may include offering stipends for participation, rotating session facilitation across community sites, and scheduling program activities with greater sensitivity to participants’ availability.
Sections
"[{\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref1\", \"ref2\", \"ref1\", \"ref2\", \"ref3\", \"ref1\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is essential for implementing effective health equity initiatives (1). CBPR is an approach to research that intentionally shares power with community partners and involves them in the research process with the goal of greater benefit to the community (2). By fostering collaboration between local community leaders and researchers, CBPR equips community leaders with rigorous academic tools and helps secure funding for scaling up initiatives. At the same time, it enables researchers to align their priorities with those of the community, leverage local knowledge, and engage stakeholders across systems, including residents, practitioners, and policymakers (1). This reciprocal approach compels research to be actionable and enhances its sustainability (2). Despite these compelling reasons for CBPR, the current academic and research enterprises are not adequately incentivized to build and maintain engaged research capacity among researchers, communities or health systems (3). NASEM puts forth several recommendations for improving community engagement research including workforce capacity and training, institutional structures and faculty incentives (1).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref4\", \"ref5\", \"ref6\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"Underscoring the need for equitable community engagement is the stark fact that traditional research paradigms (e.g., RCTs in highly controlled settings) in the absence of meaningful community buy-in have failed to significantly reduce health disparities among vulnerable populations (4, 5). Moreover, reviews of existing discoveries demonstrated that it takes approximately 17\\u202fyears for 14% of original research to translate into public health practice (6). CBPR is one solution for improving the translation of evidence-based practices, as it includes implementation of internal and external processes that are essential for research translation, such as community readiness and fit between innovation and community preferences.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref7\", \"ref8\", \"ref9\", \"ref10\", \"ref11\", \"ref7\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"Academic institutions are called to develop the infrastructure for CBPR, yet incorporating community members with lived experience requires meaningful engagement (7). Moreover, there is considerable community distrust for academic and medical institutions due to historical and ongoing harms (8, 9). Clinical and Translational Science Award centers often address these limitations through structured interactions between faculty seeking research input, and community members with lived experience, for example Community Engagement Studios (10, 11). Those programs, though, are meant to include community members as advisors, not as collaborators, in the research. Deeper engagement is needed to position community members as equal partners in the research (7).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref12\", \"ref13\", \"ref12\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"There are few notable examples of capacity-building for academic-community collaborators. One program, Engage for Equity, created tools to support community\\u2013academic partnerships in strengthening their research processes and outcomes (12). The tools, informed by prior studies conducted by Wallerstein and colleagues (13) aim at guiding (a) reflection about the partnership context and history, (b) planning and evaluation of partnership processes and intervention implementation, (c) strengthening partnership quality, and (d) promising practices. One such tool is the River of Life Reflection, where teams represent their collective partnership journey through artistic expression, identifying accomplishments, turning points, and roadblocks. The activity relies on symbols, drawings, magazine clippings, and any other type of visual representation to use as metaphors for their partnership history and progress. Evaluations of this and the other tools show these tools are feasible and acceptable to participants (12). These tools have been used with hundreds of trainees as part of a summer institute, although it is offered for a fee to participants. While the institute is open to researchers, students, and community members, it is not clear whether the program is intended for teams that have both academics and community members who are committed to working together.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref14\", \"ref14\", \"ref14\"], \"section\": \"Introduction\", \"text\": \"Another exemplary program is the CBPR Partnership Academy (CBPR Academy) conducted by the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center (Detroit URC) since 1995. The CBPR partnership involves eight community-based organizations, two health and human service agencies, and three units at the University of Michigan, aimed at fostering and supporting CBPR partnerships to achieve health equity (14). The year-long CBPR Academy engages cohorts of approximately 12 community-academic teams in a free-of-cost 5-day course focused on (a) describing and understanding partnership formation and maintenance, (b) the use of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods in the context of CBPR studies, (c) the use of mixed methods to evaluate partnership process and outcomes, and (d) dissemination and translation of partnership results (14). Beyond the course, ongoing learning activities include a small planning grant, six online forums with all teams, and individual meetings with a community-academic mentor team over the course of the year. A mixed-method evaluation with two cohorts highlighted that providing modeling and mentoring to teams of community members and their academic partners solidified their partnerships and strengthened their capacity to grow and sustain their initiatives (14).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref15\"], \"section\": \"The CAP-HEP team\", \"text\": \"While the CBPR Collaborative and CBPR webinar series we created were focused on faculty capacity building for CBPR, they did not provide structured opportunities to learn with community partners. Recognizing that learning CBPR is best when it is applied (15), the team envisioned the CAP-HEP program would be for researchers who had established a new partnership, but lacked formal CBPR training, and their community partners. By involving teams of community-academic partners in the early stages of partnership development and engaging them over an extended period, CAP-HEP aimed to strengthen the trust essential to effective academic-community collaborations and to build the capacity of both partners to engage meaningfully in this work. The Detroit URC\\u2019s CBPR Academy was a model for CAP-HEP, with the first author having been a fellow of that program in years prior. The third author participated in a training that included the River of Life tool from Engage for Equity.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref14\"], \"section\": \"The planning process\", \"text\": \"Planning for CAP-HEP began in the fall of 2022 with bi-monthly meetings focused on the scope of the program and budget, timeline of implementation, marketing and promotion, recruitment and selection of teams, and curriculum development. The team also used planning meetings to identify potential academic and community partners who could serve as training facilitators and co-mentors in the program. We sought input from a Community Strategy Team at our academic unit, composed of six community advocates and leaders whose role is to inform the school on community priorities and initiatives. These leaders gave input on the format of CAP-HEP and assisted with community outreach. Additionally, consultants from the Detroit URC\\u2019s CBPR Academy met with the team on a quarterly basis over a two-year period, where insights and materials from their own program were shared. As noted above, the Detroit URC, established in 1995, has a longstanding commitment to CBPR and fostering and supporting the development and sustainability of CBPR partnerships. The Detroit URC has been guided by a decision-making community-academic Board that for the past 30\\u202fyears has met monthly to shape the Center\\u2019s priorities and initiatives. The CBPR Partnership Academy was one of the results of this priority- setting process by the Board and became a focus of their efforts starting in 2014. Both the community and academic partners on the Board played critical, equitable roles in designing the Academy, grant proposal writing, implementing the funded initiative, including serving as instructors, mentors, reviewers of grant proposals, and evaluators (14). Thus, the design and implementation of CAP-HEP in Central Texas was co-created and aligned with the Detroit URC\\u2019s CBPR principles from the outset.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"fig1\"], \"section\": \"The planning process\", \"text\": \"From these planning meetings, the CAP-HEP team decided on a 12-month CAP-HEP program that would largely mirror the CBPR Academy and include participation in a short-course, monthly peer mentoring and didactic meetings, one-on-one mentoring, and seed funds for project implementation and/or evaluation (see Figure 1 for a timeline). Packaging the program in this way aimed to foster and pace community-academic trust building, skill acquisition, and successful implementation of collaborative projects.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"tab1\"], \"section\": \"Recruitment and selection of community-academic partners\", \"text\": \"In the spring of 2023, the CAP-HEP team promoted the program through our division\\u2019s community-facing monthly newsletter and a flyer distributed directly to the Community Strategy Team and existing community collaborators. To recruit academic researchers, the CAP-HEP team shared the promotional materials with departments, schools and centers across campus. A virtual informational session was hosted in March for academics and community members interested in learning more about the CAP-HEP program. In April, the CAP-HEP team reviewed applications submitted by nine community-academic teams, selecting five partnership teams who met the following criteria: (a) team was in the early stages of partnership, (b) team had a proposed health equity project that was conceptualized by both the academic and the community partner, (c) team articulated how the CAP-HEP program would support their partnership, and (d) team submitted a commitment letter from their supervisors to optimize their ability to fully participate in the program. The five teams that were selected among the nine applicants, and their background and projects are described in Table 1.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref16\", \"tab2\", \"ref12\", \"ref16\", \"ref17\"], \"section\": \"The short course\", \"text\": \"The sessions in the short course consisted of a welcome dinner at a restaurant, experiential learning activities (16), team strategic planning, didactic lectures, and invited panel presentations (Table 2). Experiential learning activities, such as The River of Life (12), a power \\u201cconstruction and deconstruction\\u201d activity for faculty using legos, and others, focused on providing a safe environment where participants could explore the values committing them to their partnership, take perspective on their shared and individual journeys, and to encourage agency and promote appreciation for each other (16). Participants also had planning sessions where they could apply key CBPR concepts to their individual projects. Supplementing experiential learning activities and team planning sessions were skill-building didactic lectures on topics, such as photovoice, world cafe conversations, and coalition-building, among others (17\\u201319). Finally, panel discussions featured seasoned community-academic teams and were co-facilitated by academic and community leaders with a strong history of collaboration in the region. Such co-facilitated sessions were intended to demonstrate successful collaborations and their paths, challenges, and opportunities.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"tab1\"], \"section\": \"Team composition\", \"text\": \"Five community-academic partnership teams participated and completed the CAP-HEP program (Table 1). These teams represented \\n three from the same institution of higher education (i.e., Medical School, College of Liberal Arts, College of Natural Sciences) and one from a different institution of higher education (i.e., Nursing) and \\n across both institutions (i.e., Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, African and African Diaspora Studies, Human Development and Family Sciences, and Nursing). All academic partners were at the Assistant Professor level. The community organizations served (i.e., individuals with chronic health conditions, Black mothers, BIPOC LGBTQ individuals, older adults and rural residents) and the team projects reflected five \\n (i.e., gentrification and healthcare access, gender-affirming care, perinatal mental health, rural health, and physical activity for older adults).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref2\", \"ref12\", \"ref16\", \"ref15\", \"ref20\"], \"section\": \"Discussion\", \"text\": \"Experiential learning has been the hallmark of other community engagement capacity-building programs (2, 12, 16), as it promotes capacity for perspective-taking and vulnerability when working with people of different backgrounds (15). CAP-HEP drew on experiential learning to assist community-academic teams in identifying each partner\\u2019s assets and growth areas and reflect and plan for partnership processes more broadly. Experiential activities were mostly taught as part of the short course, and included values exploration and partnership history, partnership planning and expected outcomes, discussion of power dynamics in democratizing research, and separate discussions for academic and community partners about challenges they face in their work environment. For example, faculty engaged in an experiential activity involving legos, where they were instructed to physically construct and represent their place in academia and the communities in which they wish to engage. This is significant because researchers interested in CBPR often face contradictory messages and demands in their academic environments. Our exercise aimed to provide a safe place where they could acknowledge the lack of agency they at times experience in academia due to their area of scholarship, approach to scholarship, or their intersecting identities, while also recognizing the power they have as academics relative to their community partners (20).\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref16\"], \"section\": \"Discussion\", \"text\": \"Whereas our program mirrored others in its reliance on experiential learning (16), especially as part of the short course, we incorporated a heavy emphasis on skills-building in community engagement and research. We recognized that to carry out a community-based participatory research project successfully, early career faculty in the program needed to build competence in CBPR and mixed-methods, while community leaders could benefit from structured and innovative approaches to engagement and evaluation. Skills-building content requested by teams at the conclusion of the short course, was delivered by our CAP-HEP faculty and staff trainers, who have expertise in community engagement tools such as photovoice, world caf\\u00e9 conversations, community engagement studios, and others, but who also have extensive experience conducting quantitative and qualitative research as part of collaborative projects with local and regional partners. Participating teams learned through lectures, hands-on application, and by incorporating these methods into their team projects. For example, one team utilized world caf\\u00e9 conversations to engage older populations, another team conducted photovoice with Black mothers, yet a third team utilized surveys, and the other two conducted focus groups and interviews.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref21\", \"ref15\"], \"section\": \"Discussion\", \"text\": \"Whereas faculty may have access to research training in their academic setting, our approach to research training is that data collection, whether quantitative or qualitative, is not conducted in a vacuum. That is, data collection that involves engagement and trust-building through community partnership is in the interest of ethical and effective research (21). Moreover, data collection shifts away from an objective examination of a subject that further \\u201cmakes the research distant from the people\\u201d (p. 80), to co-creation of knowledge that humanizes their life experiences, dignifies the person, and builds hope and agency (15). Noteworthy is that participating faculty were in their early career stages, so they had limited training and exposure to these methods in a community context. Similarly, the clinical faculty members had limited research experience, so the benefit of these specific skill-building tools extended to both community and academic team members.\"}, {\"pmc\": \"PMC12339544\", \"pmid\": \"40800020\", \"reference_ids\": [\"ref15\"], \"section\": \"Discussion\", \"text\": \"As we plan for future cohorts, we heed this first cohort\\u2019s recommendations for improvement. First, we plan to increase skills-based research training offered through CAP-HEP, including basic quantitative and qualitative skills, IRB submissions, as well as more nuanced training in partnership sustainability. Second, although we incorporated equitable practices throughout the CAP-HEP program, such as co-facilitating sessions with community collaborators, having community collaborators as co-mentors, and discussing issues of power in experiential learning activities, ongoing conversations with the teams suggests that more needs to be done to build trust. We attribute this to the historical abuses committed by academic institutions that range from \\u201cparachute research\\u201d and neglect, extractive language and power dynamics with academics as \\u201cknowledge producers\\u201d and communities as \\u201cknowledge recipients,\\u201d to downright deceit and harmful practices (15). While community participants felt empowered by the program and in their partnership, they also described challenges related to time, training location, and financial constraints\\u2014factors that reinforced existing inequities. Looking ahead, we plan to address these concerns through both content and process-level changes. For example, we aim to develop new program content that includes deeper conversations about community burden in CBPR, trust-building, and equitable resource sharing. Process-wise, we plan to implement more intentional practices such as forming a dedicated community-academic decision-making board or steering committee and proactively addressing the financial and time burdens placed on community members. These actions may include offering stipends for participation, rotating session facilitation across community sites, and scheduling program activities with greater sensitivity to participants\\u2019 availability.\"}]"
Metadata
"{\"section-at-acceptance\": \"Public Health Education and Promotion\"}"