Beyond Incentives for Involvement to Compensation for Consultants: Increasing Equity in CBPR Approaches

Abstract

Background: Community-based participatory research (CBPR) strives for equitable collaboration among community and academic partners throughout the research process. To build the capacity of academia to function as effective research partners with communities, the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH)’s Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA), developed a community engagement consulting model. This new model harnesses the expertise of community partners with CBPR experience and compensates them equitably to provide technical assistance to community–academic research partnerships. Objectives: This paper describes approaches to valuing community expertise, the importance of equitable compensation for community partners, the impact on the community partners, opportunities for institutional change, and the constraints faced in model implementation. Methods: Community Experts (CEs) are independent contractor consultants. CEs were interviewed to evaluate their satisfaction with their engagement and compensation for their work. Lessons Learned: (1) CEs have knowledge, power, and credibility to push for systems change. (2) Changes were needed within the university to facilitate successful consultation to community–academic partnerships. (3) Sustaining the CE role requires staff support, continued compensation, increased opportunities for engagement, and careful consideration of position demands. (4) The role provides benefits beyond financial compensation. (5) Opportunities to gather deepened relationships within the partnership and built collective knowledge that strengthened the project. Conclusions: Leveraging CE expertise and compensating them for their role benefits both university and community. Creating a place for community expertise within academia is an important step toward equitably including the community in research.

Researcher readiness for participating in community-engaged dissemination and implementation research: a conceptual framework of core competencies

“…Investigators may have an inflated sense of how implementation Bshould^be done, and community members may believe that their concerns will be dismissed or that they do not have the necessary skills to participate in research [23]. In addition to such interpersonal factors, structural barriers also may exist, such as uncompensated time for stakeholders and/or burdensome processes required for transferring funds between universities and stakeholders [24]. These challenges may cause researchers to avoid stakeholder engagement altogether.…”

Community Experiences and Perceptions of Clinical and Translational Research and Researchers

“…Similarly, we found more favorable perceptions of community value and trust among community stakeholders who perceived compensation to be appropriate, which is necessary to build equitable and sustainable community-academic partnerships institutions. 16 To date, there has been a gap in existing literature on how to equitably compensate community stakeholders for their role in CEnR. We advocate for the inclusion of community stakeholders in development of fair compensation guidelines for community expertise and contributions to research endeavors.…”

Research Apprenticeship and Its Potential as a Distinct Model of Peer Research Practice

“…By providing on the job training and subsequently hiring newly minted skilled workers, engaged research groups would realize aspirational principles of the participatory process (social responsibility, correction of knowledge imbalance, democratization of knowledge) (27,28) and offer a concrete benefit to the disadvantaged communities they engage(29,30). …”