About the Community Engagement Resource Center

Community engagement and participatory methods recognize people at the heart of an issue as experts and integral partners in research, policy development, or program design. These methods require an ongoing process of relationship-building, grounded in shared decision-making power and racial equity.

The Community Engagement Resource Center (CERC) aims to ensure that researchers, funders, policymakers, community members, and participatory practitioners—as well as people with lived experience—have the tools to co-lead efforts that better reflect their communities’ goals and priorities.

What We Do

We provide a variety of external partners with the following technical assistance on community engagement and participatory methods:

• Conduct workshops and trainings to help organizations increase their capacity to use community engagement methods and embed them into their mission, theory of change, and core systems.
• Help partners create Community Advisory Boards (CABs), including training staff and recruiting CAB members, informing or co-implementing projects, and evaluating CAB outcomes.
• Facilitate data walks or data interactives, or train partners to lead them, by providing logistical guidance and preparing content.

We also carry out our own research projects in collaboration with community members as co-experts and decision-makers. This includes

• conducting participatory and community-engaged research for federal and local government agencies (PDF), philanthropies, public housing authorities, and community-based organizations;
• developing tools and frameworks for ethical and equitable community engagement in research projects;
• evaluating initiatives that include CABs; and
• convening peer institutions and leaders to foster systems-wide cultural changes in research, policy, and practice.

For technical assistance and partnership requests, contact us at [email protected].