Action Area One: Situate research to be accountable to communities

Research practices, funding, and sharing of findings is ethically accountable to communities, is led or co-led by community members, and builds on community-centered knowledge, wisdom, beliefs, and lived experience, rather than validating or verifying them. The leadership and knowledge of community-based research is uplifted and embraced as part of the larger action research ecosystem, situated equitably alongside and in collaboration with academic and industry research.

  • An Example in Action

    To ensure the HSKS is operating in service to community betterment, funders can co-develop funding opportunities with community input and leadership (from design to review); Academia can expand avenues (resources, positions, etc.) to support, connect, and share work led by community and grassroots researchers (in addition to support for researchers housed within the academy), and leverage institutional positionality to achieve greater impact; Journals can create special issues to help build internal and external capacity for publishing more community-generated knowledge; and Non-profits can establish community feedback mechanisms that hold institutional partners and non-profit governance structures accountable to community priorities throughout and after research projects, and ensure that institutions are accountable for results that are desired by the community.

  • Journals
    • Create special issues to help build internal and external capacity for publishing more community-generated knowledge
    • Diversify editorial boards and peer reviewers to include community members and practitioners
    • Consider using a co-editor model to offset editorial burdens and diversify leadership/perspectives
    • Prioritize open-access by adopting strategies such as: transformative agreements (where libraries pay for both reading and publishing rights to remove fees for authors and readers), partnering with external funders to subsidize open access fees, creating nonprofit journals that operate as public goods with donor support, and implementing sliding-scale open access fees, which recognize research as a public good
    • Publish research that includes an acknowledgment of the research team’s perspectives and positionality 
  • Funders
    • Co-develop funding opportunities with community input and leadership (from design to review)
    • Diversify boards of directors to include people with relevant lived experience
    • Build relationships among foundation staff and community groups by employing foundation staff from geographically and contextually relevant communities
    • Promote authentic power-sharing within research teams throughout the research process by directly funding community organizations to lead or co-lead research projects
    • Require an acknowledgment of the research team’s perspective and positionality in the application process
    • Provide flexible and long-term funding
  • Academia
    • Revise tenure and promotion criteria, practices, and processes to demonstrate and actualize the value of community partnerships and real-world impact over publication and citation metrics, ensuring consistent standards within academic departments
    • Create a parallel community Institutional Review Board (IRB) to guide and review the relevance of research to community members
    • Expand avenues (resources, positions, etc.) to support, connect, and share work led by community and grassroots researchers (in addition to support for researchers housed within the academy), and leverage institutional positionality to achieve greater impact
  • Non-profits
    • Establish organizational governance and decision-making structures in which directly impacted community members share decision-making authority (e.g., as board members or part of a community accountability council to monitor institutional commitments, partnership agreements, dissemination plans, and implementation outcomes)
    • Create opportunities for directly impacted community members to define research priorities, interpret findings, and shape recommendations as equal partners throughout the research process (e.g., by serving as Co-PIs on research grants or on a community institutional review board, based on their desired level of involvement)
    • Create community-centered engagement practices for shared learning, data interpretation, knowledge creation, and decision-making, such as data dinners, scenario workshops, community writing groups, or public interpretation sessions
    • Establish community feedback mechanisms that hold institutional partners and non-profit governance structures accountable to community priorities throughout and after research projects, and ensure that institutions are accountable for results that are desired by the community
    • Invest in building the long-term organizational capacity of non-profits, including the contracting, budgeting, auditing, and negotiating expertise necessary to secure equitable contracts or grant agreements to retain greater control over the research process

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