Realizing the Promise of Community-Based Participatory Research: Community Partners Get Organized!

In their provocative pair of articles,^1,2 the West End Revitalization Association (WERA) and their academic partners articulate a model of community-owned and managed research (COMR) model that is in stark contrast to the university-owned and managed research (UOMR) model that characterizes most research, including most of what is referred to as community-based participatory research (CBPR). As COMR demonstrates, intellectual spaces exist outside of higher educational and research institutions. Communities can be hubs for discovering new knowledge, generating and testing theories, translating research into action and sharing innovations. If building community capacity, creating and mobilizing knowledge, and achieving social justice are the penultimate goals of CBPR, achieving them may only be possible when communities are at the center of learning, discovery and engagement.

Many of the authors' criticisms of the UOMR model and the remedies they put in place are reflected in the recommendations and ongoing work of community leaders from across the United States we convened in April 2006 for a Community Partner Summit to advance authentic community-higher education partnerships.³ Summit participants – a diverse group with years of experience in service-learning, CBPR and community/economic development partnerships with universities – concluded that while combining the knowledge, wisdom and experience in communities and in academe is key to solving the major health, social and economic challenges facing our society, the predominant model of "community-higher education partnership" is not an authentic partnership and community capacity building and social justice are rarely explicit goals. They urged their peers to share their stories of "what's working" and "what's not working" in these partnerships, serving as role models by authoring case stories of their own experiences.⁴ Since the Summit, work groups are advancing significant capacity building for community partners in two priority areas: peer mentoring and policy change.

The authors contend that CBPR in practice often does not go far enough and we agree. WERA was fortunate in having ingredients for successful CBPR that are often not present simultaneously: a compelling community need, a high degree of organizational capacity, willing academic partners with relevant expertise, and funding that mandates community control. To fully realize the potential of CBPR as illustrated by the COMR model, we must overcome deeply entrenched views and policies that serve to maintain university control of the research enterprise, and we must build the research capacity of community-based organizations (CBOs).

We applaud the Environmental Protection Agency and other funders that award research and research capacity-building grants to CBOs, but they are the exception and not the rule. The Examining Community-Institutional Partnerships for Prevention Research Group found that funding priorities, grant mechanisms and review processes often undermine the potential for authentic CBPR.⁵ The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in particular, with its investment of $22.4 billion annually in competitive research grants, is a major driver of research priorities and practices. Although NIH does fund CBPR, its investment is quite small and is overwhelmingly of the university owned and managed variety. For example, a CRISP (federal research grant) database search using the term CBPR yields 84 "hits" for the period 2000-2006. By comparison, a similar search using the term RCT (for randomized clinical trial) yields 716 "hits."

Recognizing the central role that funding can play in how CBPR is carried out, a Summit policy work group is working to ensure that community partners participate in decision making about federal funding for CBPR and access funding as principal investigators. One work group member has been appointed to the Council of Public Representatives that advises the Director of NIH and a listserv has been established to quickly disseminate announcements of similar opportunities to serve in advisory roles to federal funding agencies.⁶ Most recently, the work group submitted comments in response to two NIH requests for public input on its strategic priorities and peer review processes.^7,8 We highlight here their suggestions for how NIH could better support CBPR because we believe these reforms are essential to widespread implementation of CBPR as it should be practiced...