Our Approach
Community Based Participatory Research
Community Based Participatory Research is a process that engages trusted messengers to convene community members most affected by an issue. With shared leadership throughout, a goal of creating strategies for change, team members collectively conduct research, make meaning of the results, and generate ideas.
Key Principles
- Recognizing the community as a unit of identity
- Building on the strengths and resources inherent within the community
- Facilitating collaborative partnerships throughout all phases of research
- Creating a process that shares learning and empowerment
- Explicitly addressing social and power inequities within project structure
- Cyclical and iterative process
- Distributing findings and knowledge gained to all partners
Benefits
- People will speak more freely to peers than to strangers.
- Researchers who are members of the community know the history and relationships surrounding an issue, and can place it in context
- People experiencing an issue know what’s important to them about it – what it effects, what parts of their lives it touches.
- Findings may receive more community support, because community members know that the research was conducted by people in similar circumstances.
- Citizens can take more control of issues and related projects or initiatives that impact their lives.
- Community voices come to be viewed differently be professionals and those in positions of power.