Introduction to Special Section on Engage for Equity

Welcome to a special collection in Health Education & Behavior on advances within community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community-engaged research (CEnR). Over the past 30 years, the overall research approaches of CBPR and CEnR were established and solidified with Israel and colleagues’ first publication of CBPR principles in 1998, and the 2001 Kellogg Foundation CBPR definition. Each of these have called for starting from community strengths and priorities, and promoting new knowledge to improve health equity actions. In these decades, learnings from the field have been built study by study, showcasing innovative partnering processes, methods, and outcomes. What has been missing, however, has been systematic investigation across a diversity of projects into the contexts and partnering processes that are most promising for outcomes.

The three articles in this special collection are part of a 15-year National Institutes of Health (NIH)—funded study to do just that—to understand the added value of community and other stakeholder participation in transforming academic research processes, in broadening impact beyond specific health outcomes, and in highlighting the importance of community engagement for knowledge democracy and social justice outcomes. In the first two stages of NIH funding (2006–2009 and 2009–2013), the University of New Mexico Center for Participatory Research, in collaboration with the University of Washington Indigenous Wellness Research Institute and a national “Think Tank” of community and academic CBPR practitioners, conducted literature reviews, developed a CBPR Conceptual Model, identified and surveyed measures of collaboration from 200 federally funded CEnR research projects, and analyzed our first iteration of promising practices associated with outcomes.

This special collection reports on our third stage of NIH funding, Engage for Equity (E2), which refined, translated into Spanish, and retested measures of collaborative processes and outcomes through surveying another 179 federally funded projects from 2018, as well as 36 newer pilot partnerships. The partnerships surveyed represent a continuum of community engagement, from more limited community outreach to shared leadership and community-driven projects. Surveyed projects were from diverse funding sources: PCORI (patient-centered outcomes research), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each of the National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality. In addition, our E2 study developed collective-reflection/action tools for strengthening partnerships across this diversity and conducted a randomized control trial of two delivery systems of these tools: workshops versus access to resources on the http://engageforequity.org website. For guidance in survey reconstruction, tool development, and workshop and web design, we continued to involve our national Think Tank in deliberative reflexive practice, with core values of power sharing, multiple ways of knowing, and Paulo Freire—based emancipatory practice.

Each of these three articles presents a facet of this E2 stage. Wallerstein et al. cover the history, the CBPR model, and the research design for surveys, collective reflection/ action tools, and workshops, as well as our values and theories of change. Parker et al. delve deeply into each of the four qualitative and quantitative tools available for partnerships to use and adapt for their own goals. Lucero et al. present our trust typology, an issue of major concern across the country for strengthening group functioning and reaching desired outcomes. The three articles together showcase the E2 design and implementation as well as the first results on the importance of collective reflection, both from survey data on trust as well as workshop data on usefulness of the tools for strengthening partnership practices.

While E2 has used the language of CBPR, this study and its tools available through the website encompass the capacity of any community-engaged research project across the continuum to commit to values of shared power and to honor the wisdom and knowledge of communities within collaborative research. For public health, health education, and health promotion, we hope the processes and results from this long-term study will support greater sustainability of CBPR and CEnR projects and translation of their research findings into actions, practices, and policies for improved health and social equity.