A CBPR Approach to Creating Job Descriptions

Colorado’s Community Engagement Program aims to integrate and transform community and academic partnerships into a collaborative, broad-based translational research enterprise that will enhance public trust and reduce health disparities. Community Research Liaisons (CRLs) are one partnership resulting from this program. CRLs respectfully engage communities to address the needs of communities, partners, patients, and health providers in order to cultivate relationships between academic researchers and individuals within a population and subpopulations so that they can identify community health priorities and design locally relevant studies that address real needs. CRLs from throughout Colorado represent a variety of ethnic, urban, and rural communities.

The role of a CRL is to build bridges for communication and partnership between the community they represent, and academic researchers. This presentation identifies the process undergone to create formal job descriptions for CRLs that enable successful community/academic partnerships. CLRs met with support staff to identify key roles and responsibilities and create individualized job descriptions based on the unique nature of the communities they serve. Job descriptions were combined with a scope of work document that was developed through a community-based participatory process. Thus, each job description is tailored to meet the needs of the community while CRLs work from the same template with an overarching purpose. 

Ultimately, the creation of job descriptions elevated the roles of CRLs in the academic and patient communities by outlining specific responsibilities, activities and metrics agreed upon in a mutually beneficial process. Other community-based projects can learn from this process and its outcomes.