Enhancing capacity of community organizations to engage in equitable research partnerships

There is growing recognition of the importance of community engagement in research for understanding and addressing health inequities. However, there is an understandable distrust of research on the part of communities, based on a history of research that has not always benefited the communities involved. As community organizations increasingly enter into research relationships with academic institutions, there is a need to enhance their capacity to ensure that such partnerships are collaborative, equitable, and beneficial to communities most affected by health inequities. To this end, the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center, a longstanding community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership, has designed, implemented, and evaluated a training curriculum to enhance capacity of community organizations to engage in collaborative research with outside institutions and researchers. The purpose of the training is to expand community knowledge and skills for ensuring equitable relationships in research partnerships. Training content includes: benefits and challenges of engaging in research; questions to ask potential academic partners; community rights in research; tools for enhancing equity; and CBPR principles. In this presentation we describe the rationale for building community capacity for collaborative research and the CBPR process used by community and academic partners to develop, conduct, and evaluate the training. We describe the curriculum content and experiential training approach used; analyze the results of the workshops conducted to date; discuss facilitating factors, challenges, and lessons learned for enhancing capacity of community-based organizations to engage in equitable research partnerships; and describe next steps for future training endeavors.