Government agencies, independent researchers, and others in power tend to involve residents and organizations as research subjects, constituents, or program participants and providers. Authentic engagement instead requires that those in power share power and include individuals and local organizations as fellow experts and decisionmakers. Agencies can build from a spectrum of engagement levels and models. Ethically speaking, inclusion is valuable and leads to more robust and accurate input, greater impact, and more sustained government programs and initiatives.

Federal Examples Of Community Engagement

HHS/OPRE: Advancing Contextual Analysis and Methods of Participatory Engagement (CAMPE)
OPRE has contracted with the Urban Institute to develop a community advisory board made up of individuals and direct service providers with experience in various Administration for Children and Families programs. The community advisory board is not engaged in a specific research project; rather, it reviews and revises agencywide guidance documents such as style guides, learning agendas, and protocols for such common data collection practices as surveys and informed consent. CAMPE final products will include materials that other federal agencies can use to incorporate community engagement in their standard operating procedures.

NIH: Ethics Training for Health in Indigenous Communities (rETHICS)
People carrying out research within diverse communities need ethics training materials that align with each community’s values. The research ethics training for health in Indigenous communities (rETHICS) was designed to align with American Indian and Alaska Native context, culture, and ethical values and principles. Community-based consultation and feedback from participants led to a culturally grounded training curriculum that teaches ethical principles and procedures for conducting research with American Indians and Alaska Natives.

EPA: Water, Our Voice to the Future Climate Change Adaptation and Waterborne Disease Prevention on the Crow ReservationReservation
Policymakers are increasingly recognizing that differences in access to safe public drinking water contribute to health disparities and environmental injustice for vulnerable communities in the United States. In 2005, a group of tribal stakeholders and Little Big Horn College researchers conducted a community-wide environmental health assessment and concluded that water contamination was the most serious health threat affecting tribal members. They used community-based participatory research to document the serious contamination of their rivers and strategies to overcome the legal, regulatory, policy, community capacity, and financial challenges.

HUD: Accessible and Participatory Methods for Involving People with Mental Disabilities in Housing Discrimination Testing
People with lived experience provided input at all phases of this research project—from identifying housing discrimination experiences to being included in the design, piloting, trainings, implementation, data collection, and drafting of findings and recommendations.

Community Engagement Tools

Our toolkits’ practical skills have helped many government agencies, community members, and service providers create participatory and community-engaged processes to shape research and program goals and share decisionmaking.

• Data Walks: An Innovative Way to Share Data with Communities: Data walks are a tool for sharing and contextualizing data and research findings with community members before agencies make data-driven decisions. This toolkit defines data walks and describes how to run them.
• Changing Power Dynamics among Researchers, Local Governments, and Community Members: This toolkit describes how community-engaged methods can advance racial equity and provides examples of local government-led initiatives that embed racial equity and use community engaged
• Community-Engaged Surveys: From Research Design to Analysis and Dissemination: This toolkit covers how to incorporate community-engaged methods into survey research, with guidance on drafting research questions; piloting; survey implementation; and analysis, drafting, and dissemination.
• Equitable Compensation for Community Engagement Guidebook: Underscores the importance of government agencies and research institutions paying community members and people with lived experience as experts. Provides example budgets and budget exercises for researchers to use in building out participatory projects.
• Exploring Individual and Institutional Positionality: Describes and dissects the importance for researchers to understand their personal identity and guides readers on unpacking the ways in which their identity shapes their work and view of the world.
• Fostering Partnerships for Community Engagement: This toolkit explores why building equitable and sustainable partnerships is important, how to find and evaluate potential partners, and what practices are best for building deep, sustained partnerships.
• Increasing the Rigor of Quantitative Research with Participatory and Community-Engaged Methods: Describes how researchers can use participatory research and community-engaged methods when conducting quantitative data collection and analysis.
• Tools and Resources for Project-Based Community Advisory Boards: This toolkit contains key tools and resources for planning, forming, and operating a community advisory board, including a considerations checklist, project examples, an institutional review board tool, and a budget tool.
• Youth Engagement in Policy, Research, and Practice: This toolkit explains how to strategically and safely engage young people and includes a snapshot of the benefits of youth engagement, practitioners’ methods and tools, guiding questions, and a project evaluation worksheet.

The following toolkits and trainings are under development:

• Engagement 101 Training: Provides hands-on skills-building and leaves trainees with a structure and tools to conduct participatory research and/or community-engaged program development.
• Collaborative Budgeting and Financial Reciprocity: Teaches program administrators, policymakers, and technical assistance providers the importance of, and how to, collaborate with community members to share power over financial decisionmaking.

About CERC

The Community Engagement Resource Center (CERC) aims to equip individuals and organizations in positions of traditional power (financial resources, decisionmaking, etc.) to center community priorities by (1) building their skills in participatory research methods and community engagement, (2) creating and using accessible tools and trainings, and (3) creating the commitment to systems-wide cultural change that redistributes power and resources. CERC sits within the Urban Institute’s Office of Race and Equity Research.