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Building Successful Community-Academic Research Partnerships

Bettye Anderson Frederic, MSN

Sarah L. Goff, MD, PhD

Kathleen Szegda, PhD, MS, MPH

Project ACCCES

January 20, 2022

Community-Engaged Research Training

Session II

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Welcome Back!

Please share in chat:

Your name
Your institution
Your departmental affiliation

Please respond to the poll question.

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Reminder

Please:

Share your perspectives
Respect differences (experiences, opinions, etc.)
Ask questions
Listen to understand
Share the “air time”
Open yourself to learning
Disagree (respectfully!) with us and each other

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Building a Successful and Equitable Community-Researcher

Partnership Team

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Common Characteristics of Successful Community-Researcher Partnerships

SUCCESSFUL PARTNERSHIPS

Trust

Equitable processes and procedures

Tangible benefits to all partners

Balance process, activities, outcomes

Culturally humble and appropriately skilled staff and researchers

Supportive organizational policies & reward structures

Collaborative dissemination

Ongoing partnership assessment, improvement and celebration

Sustainable impact

Adapted from Seifer S. “Building and Sustaining Community-Institutional Partnerships for Prevention Research: Findings from a National Collaborative,” J Urban Hlth 2006.

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… is critical

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Creating Partnership & Working Together�Dimensions of Success

Successful Collaboration

Results

Process

Relationships

*Interaction Institute for Social Change concepts of Facilitative Leadership

Recognize and appreciate differences!

All of these dimensions are needed

This is a facilitative leadership concept that we use regularly in our work when we think about creating partnerships and working in partnership - the results, relationship, process triangle- and that we use in the research partnership process. We need all aspects of this in a successful collaboration, but people may naturally align more with certain aspects of it. We also use this as a tool to be able to talk about differences. For example, I tend more towards results and I had a group co-facilitator who was more process oriented and there was a little rub sometimes because we had different expectations about what would come from a meeting we would plan for a collaborative we were working on. Once we called it out, we were able to talk about it and think about how what we each bring strengthened the work. There are also differences based on the work you do and the perspective you bring. For example, many in academics may have a results orientation because of the culture. Whereas, community partners may be more relationships or process oriented.

Ask to share in chat what they think they lean towards

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Fostering Equitable Relationships and Processes

Communication/language - clear communication
Power - acknowledging and addressing power differentials
Bias - understanding bias we all bring to the table
Trust - working towards trust
Decision-Making - clear, transparent decision-making
Resolving Conflict - establish structures before occurs

Discuss these factors that contribute to equitable relationships and processes. Its important to consider how systems of oppression in our society, including racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, ageism and others impact power, bias and trust. And as human beings with multiple identities, they intersect. We are focusing on anti-racism in this training series, but want to make sure to lift up that all of these have impacts on health equity and also forming equitable research partnerships.

Communication/language - clear communication as discussed is critical. As Sarah mentioned, we learned early on that the terms community and research meant different things and we needed to make sure that we were defining terms and doing checks to make sure we were all understanding what we were saying to avoid misunderstandings

Power - acknowledging and addressing power differentials and privilege

Bias - understanding bias we all bring to the table

Trust - working towards trust

Decision-Making - clear, transparent decision-making models. Models such as consensus, majority, who has decision-making power, etc.

Resolving Conflict - establish structures, its inevitable that there will be conflict. Use ground rules and other tools to make things discussable in a safe way.

Meeting structure is critical!

Structures to ensure voice, power, mutually beneficial use of time

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Levels of Racism

MDPH, “An Introduction to the COVID - 19 Community Impact Survey(CCIS). Levels of Racism.”

A lot of people may be familiar with the levels of racism, but we wanted to make sure we all have a shared understanding

Internalized racism - our private beliefs and biases about race and racism, influenced

by our culture. This can take many different forms including: prejudice towards others of a different race; internalized oppression—the negative beliefs about oneself by people of color; or internalized privilege—beliefs about superiority or entitlement by white people.

Interpersonal - individuals interact with others and their personal racial

beliefs affect their public interactions.

Institutional occurs within institutions and systems of power- This refers to the unfair policies and discriminatory practices of particular institutions (schools,

workplaces, etc.) that routinely produce racially inequitable outcomes for people of color and

advantages for white people.

Structural s racial bias among institutions and across society - This involves the cumulative and compounding effects of an array of societal factors, including

the history, culture, ideology and interactions of institutions and policies that systematically

privilege white people and disadvantage people of color.

Structural -

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Dominant Culture

Example: White Supremacy/Dominant Culture

Tema Okun. “White Supremacy Culture.” https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/uploads/4/3/5/7/43579015/okun_-_white_sup_culture_2020.pdf.

“Culture is powerful …because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify…[white dominant/supremacy culture norms] are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being proactively named or chosen by the group.”

- Tema Okun

Examples from Project ACCCES:

Superiority of the written word vs. other forms of communication
Priorities and timelines vs. for sustainability and equity
Transactional vs. transformative relationships

As discussed last week, there has been movement towards thinking beyond the levels of racism to dominant culture perpetuating structural inequities. Some of you may be familiar with White Supremacy/Dominant culture characteristics. As stated here by Tema Okun…

Though this focuses on White Supremacy/dominant, it is relevant to any dominant culture that may exclude people, practices and systems that do not fit into the norms or standards. We’ve used this to examine our practices with our organization, and community partners have asked us to reflect how White Supremacy culture shows up in our research and evaluation work.

Some examples that have come up through Project ACCCES discussions and other research partnership work include…

Superiority of the written word vs. other forms of communication - email heavy; how info is disseminated (e.g. publications)

Priorities and timelines vs. for sustainability and equity - academic calendar or semester not aligning with partners; urgency that is brought on by grant or academic calendar year timelines

Transactional vs. transformative relationships - partnership for grant vs to over time to make change in community

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Asking Questions About the Narrative and Assumptions

Self-reflect on narratives that may be operating
What values underlie decision-making processes?
Who is at the decision-making table, and who is not?
Who has the power at the table?
What standards of success

and criteria are being applied

at different decision points,

and by whom?

Adapted from Jean Ayers, MN Dept of Health “Advancing Health Equity”

Equity in the Process

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Panel Discussion

Luis Valdez and Lamont Scott

Susan Shaw and Cristina Huebner-Torres

Introductions
Panel Questions
Audience Questions

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Break

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Paired Activity

Each person assumes one role:

A time traveler from the 1600s
A person from this time

Scenario:

Time traveler has badly injured their arm
Person from this time must convince them to get an x-ray

Discussion Prompts:

What was hard?
What helped to be able to communicate effectively?
How might power, bias, and assumptions impact this?
How does this apply to communication in your partnerships?

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Small Group Discussion

What about the workshop excited you?
How can you apply what was learned today?
Share examples of how you are going to apply what you learned

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Thank You!

Please complete the workshop evaluation!