Table 1.

Realisations and learnings from outreach with grassroots associations (GAs)

Realisation	Learnings
Grassroots associations
GAs generally focus on very specific event-based activities	Within GAs, sociocultural organisations predominantly focus on regular cultural/recreational events, educational organisations on conducting educational sessions or faith-based organisations on religious events. In general, GAs focus on preparing and holding several predefined events that are repeated yearly, for example, Bangla new year and Eid or Puja celebrations.
Research engagement has been a distant idea for GAs	There is a clear lack of understanding as to why it is important for them to get involved in research or why researchers should become involved with the community. They either had not been exposed to the possibility of getting involved in any type of research as an organisation previously or they were approached to participate in a research project or disseminate a call for participants, but they were never asked to partner with a research programme.
Initiating research awareness was needed	Neither the academics (eg, our research team) nor the grassroots organisations had a strong understanding of community research capacity-building needs; this issue became important, as simply creating capacity-development opportunities is insufficient. Facilitation and support for community organisations to avail themselves of research opportunities is also important; for example, we developed community scholar and citizen researcher programmes where we hold sessions on different issues related to research capacity on a monthly basis, but we needed to deliver the sessions on weeknights or weekends so that grassroots organisation members could participate.