What does infrastructure building look like to engage community partners in research?

In 2009, the NIH released a call for proposals to build sustainable community-linked infrastructure to enable health science research. The Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR) was funded to conduct the project entitled "Enhancing Community/Academic Clinical Research Collaboration." The project builds on existing strengths of MICHR's Community Engagement program to further coordinate and expand the research expertise of community partners in collaboration with three Clinical Research Associates (CRAs) rooted in three focal communities of Detroit, Flint, and Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor. The overall goals of the project are to: enhance capacity of community partners to engage in, contribute to and direct community-based research activities in an empowered and independent fashion; streamline and support the development of academic/community collaborations and strengthen the community benefit created by the collaborative research effort; and utilize CBPR principles to develop and refine stages of the research process for engaging partners and linking partnerships to outcomes and ultimately dissemination of best practices. The CRAs will organize and lead focus groups with community leaders and social service agency personnel to gain insight into solutions to barriers to community/researcher partnerships; assess community strengths and challenges to address training needs; and in collaboration with university scientists develop training modules to build capacity to conduct research. CRAs will actively participate in the development of community trainings and foster community/academic partnerships; develop methods to deliver and share training opportunities; and create a talent exchange/web portal to connect researchers with community partners. These efforts aim to build infrastructure to improve health research.