Best Practices for Community Partnership

Engaging with communities is a very important aspect of any research regarding the community. Through experience and research, here are the best practices guide for community partnerships.

Foster Reciprocal Partnerships

It is very important that the partnership is binding each of the two parties equally. The researchers and the community members are jointly working together. As a researcher, it is important to be as respectful and understanding as possible. The people you are working with are just as important to the research as you are. Reciprocal partnerships are also important in meeting up with community members to interview and communicate with them. Some good questions to ask yourself to foster reciprocal partnerships are: Is the meeting location familiar and accessible to everyone involved? Is the form of communication easy for the community member? Are you communicating everything accurately to each other? Are you cultivating a dynamic that allows questions of curiosity to be asked? Are you showing the utmost respect to the community member?

Listen more than you speak

Get to know the community members well. It is more important and beneficial to listen more than you speak. The more you listen to community members, the better you can understand them and their situation. Seek each person’s perspective, expertise, and lived experiences. Get their input. It is so important to come to the partnership remembering you are engaging to work alongside the community, not for the community.

Integrate yourself within the community

When researches partner with communities, it is good to integrate yourself within the community. It is important to recognize the beauty of the community and its members. When you take the “us and them” mentality, it can cause harm. When partnering with communities, personally get to know your neighbors and partners.

Collaborate with organizations and people already established within the community

Collaboration with organizations and people that have ties within the community and are already established is a very important part of the research. For example, we worked with NHabitBham and the Bush Hills neighborhood President, Walladean Streeter, to get connections within the community. This allowed us to listen and learn from people already working in and engaging with the community who know the community very well.

 

Emma Palmer