Learning together through tensions and contradictions This article describes findings from an evaluation of a multisectoral research initiative called Assets Coming Together for Youth(ACT for Youth), a community-academic research alliance that brings together multi-disciplinary academics, graduate student research assistants, community stakeholders and youth research interns. Midway through this five-year project, the alliance's Evaluation Working Group undertook a number of reflexive research exercises to better understand how these different partnership group members experienced the collaborative process. In this article, we draw primarily on focus group and interview data to address the following question: what are people's perspectives on ACT for Youth's organisational structures, goals, methods and early outcomes? From an evaluative point of view, we assessed whether participants felt they had sufficient opportunity to bring their perspectives or knowledge to bear on project implementation and whether the collaborative process reflected the project's social justice -or equity -standpoint. In addition to assessing the degree to which people felt they were able to give voice to divergent points of view, the research sought to understand social, historical and institutional conditions that enabled and/ or restricted an equitable collaborative process. Data reveal three

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This chapter critically examines the role of community-engaged research (CER) for addressing equity and access for vulnerable communities, with attention to youth engagement in research. CER aims to transform the relationship between research and communities. While traditional research approaches relate to communities as merely the "objects of knowledge" and "sources of data," CER strives to engage communities as active partners and collaborators in the knowledge production process by emphasizing the values of collaboration, participation, and actionvalues that are well aligned with that of social work. Emerging literature

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