Leveraging Academic Institutional Structures to Support Asian American Community Organizations’ Engagement in Research: The Korean Community Service Center

My research partnership with the Korean Community Service Center (KCSC) of Seattle is the deepest research relationship I have had since transitioning from working with a national “minority health” organization, the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF), to academic research. As director of the APIAHF Chronic Disease Programs, I served local community-based organizations like KCSC. My subsequent academic scholarship has focused on community engagement and community-based research but from a perspective primarily situated outside of the community. My relationship with KCSC, an organization founded by locally-defined Korean American stakeholders to serve their Korean American community began in 2018 on a small limited project (the Korean American Youth Survey) and over time has blossomed into my current role as part-time Deputy Director and Director of Assessment, Research and Evaluation. Through this on-going journey, I have learned much about community-academic collaborations; thus, I offer my reflections on the KCSC “partnership” because of its unique qualities and my deep involvement.

Partnership vision and strategies.

The overall vision of research partnership is to develop and promote a model in which the KCSC is a learning community-based organization (CBO) akin to learning healthcare organizations (Greene, Reid, Larson 2012). This approach is a significant shift for an organization founded 37 years ago for mutual aid and service. For example, the parent/caregiver education implementation project sponsored by Best Starts for Kids ((BSK) King County-DCHS 2021) has been our most important investment of time and energy because it provided access to key capacity building resources (e.g., staffing and organizational development, data platform development, data visualization trainings, etc.).

To realize this vision, four strategies have been vital to success. (1) As a learning-CBO, we adopted an implementation science approach that serves as a framework for iterative learning and action. (2) Although we partner with University of Washington (UW) researchers to contribute generalizable knowledge, additional assessment, research, and evaluation activities are supported through philanthropic funds to inform flexible program and community initiative development (i.e., in contrast to generalizable knowledge). (3) As part of our BSK project planning, we established culturally-informed principles of partnership which we revisit while engaging in the work. (4) We ground our work in living logic models (i.e., evolving explanatory models of cause and effect that inform our program planning and evaluation) informed by both our community’s lived experiences and the available literature. These models encapsulate the “why” behind our efforts. They bring staff, advisors, funders, and community members together in common understanding, and forces us to better center our strategies, identify intermediary outcomes and measures of change. Taking BSK for example, we’ve adopted a trauma-informed intergenerational approach where we connect our elders’ trauma’s (e.g., Japanese occupation, the Korean War) to waves of subsequent U.S. immigration and the cultural conflicts which exist between 1^st and 2^nd generation world views. We applied this to the development of culturally-relevant parenting education that raises community awareness in the short term and encourages family communication as an intermediary outcome, ultimately toward measurable change in parenting behaviors and children’s mental health.

Six intensive practices have been critical for our program development and research efforts. (1) Months of weekly conversations with leadership about the organization, community, and research, led to a shared vision for how to move forward: both with the initial Korean Youth Survey and more broadly our working relationship. (2) We check-in with community members (staff and volunteers) at initial stages of every project’s development before formal community engagement to ensure that we are on the right track. (3) In parallel, we convene advisory committees of subject matter experts from the Korean American community for both program and research activities. (4) We routinely conduct formative qualitative research with community members for new projects and to inform iterations of program implementation in varied contexts (Cho, et al. unpublished). (5) We invest in staff training conducted by experienced researchers so that KCSC staff are empowered to conduct research activities. (6) Finally, we actively “return results” by convening forums to share our findings, engage community stakeholders and decision-makers, and disseminate through ethnic print, radio, online media, and social media platforms.

Key Accomplishments.

The most significant accomplishment has been conducting research that matters to the community and informs allocation of public and private resources for community-based prevention and intervention programs and services. For the organization, coupling research and organizational capacity building has been a decisive advantage in demonstrating our relatively sophisticated model and vision of becoming a learning-CBO. By taking the initiative to seek out and develop research partnerships where KCSC leads and UW researchers serve as consultants and collaborators (e.g., BSK projects), we have flipped the model to yield direct community benefits while still contributing to generalizable research. From a capacity building perspective, we have been able to make space for subject matter experts, many of whom were former academics in Korea, to contribute their skills to community-based projects. Perhaps the best marker of our success has been the increasing interest from government agencies and foundations for KCSC to conduct robust, research informed development of services and programs.

Challenges.

New models of research present challenges. To this day, we still advocate for disaggregating data from population-based studies because “Asian” or “AANHPI” (Asian American Native Hawaiians Pacific Islanders) promotes the myth that we are a model minority and fails to represent ethnic and community specific inequities and priorities. Yet, with the advent of “big data,” the potential for disaggregating existing data to answer questions of community priority may be possible; though, to do so will require a new cadre of community-oriented bioinformatics researchers (Grayson, Doerr, Yu 2020). Such innovations will likely resurge issues of community engagement, governance, and what constitutes trustworthy practices. For instance, community engagement has been instrumental for establishing community consent, culturally appropriate recruitment approaches, and acceptable data collection procedures. In the context of pre-existing aggregated datasets, stakeholders will need to look at community engagement in the context of explicit third-party data use and the potential risk of harms derived from data harmonization and aggregation. Furthermore, as big data becomes more widely available to individuals untethered from the primary research institution, self-governance may become the principal approach to protecting communities from derived harms.

A professional challenge is making transparent the potential conflicts I feel as both a research faculty member and member of the KCSC leadership. For example, while I am responsible for research collaborations between KCSC and other academic and governmental researchers, any research activities involving my own academic work is decided by the agency’s executive director and managers.

Lessons learned for researchers and funders creating new partnerships.

(1) Get out there and be part of “the community;” otherwise, your relationship will always be utilitarian such that conflicts of purpose, benefits, and risks may impede success. (2) By prioritizing and rewarding collaboration in funding initiatives, local funders encouraged many of the structural and process-oriented practices we have adopted. Take advantage of these opportunities to try-out and explore new configurations for collaborative research. (3) The implicit value of working with diverse communities, such as AANHPIs, as a microcosm of the larger diversity of these United States of America needs to be more explicit. Yet to do so, we must move from cultural to community competence (Robinson 2005):, from understanding a community bound by static notions of culture to recognizing the need for deeper community competence as a generalizable approach to partnership. (4) Community-based organizations (CBOs) can be hubs for community-based research independent of academic research institutions. In part this reflects the broader shift toward patient-led research and citizen-science, and community’s needs to control data, samples, and research agendas most clearly demonstrated in indigenous communities’ efforts. In an AANHPI context, it also demonstrates a need for establishing independent routes for research and funding for Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander communities.

Conclusion.

The diversity of AANHPI, and more generally BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and experiences require a commitment to recognizing our communities’ unique intersectional perspectives, especially when attempting to connect the production of generalizable knowledge to real-world practices. This commitment holds promise as a unifying approach to research partnerships.