Community-engaged Research Partnerships as Healing Spaces for Health Professionals and Researchers.

Drawing from collective experiences in our capacity building project: Health Equity Activation Research Team for Inclusion Health, we argue that while community-engaged partnerships tend to focus on understanding health inequities and developing solutions, they can be healing spaces for health professionals and researchers. Data were obtained from a 15-month participatory ethnography, including focus groups and interviews. Ethnographic notes and transcripts were coded and analyzed using both deductive and inductive coding. Practices of radical welcome, vulnerability, valuing the whole person, acknowledging how partnerships can cause harm, and centering lived experience expertise in knowledge creation processes were identified as key characteristics of healing spaces. Ultimately, health professionals and researchers work within the same social, political and economic contexts of populations with the worst health outcomes. Their own healing is critical for tackling larger systemic changes aimed at improving the well-being of communities harmed by legacies of exclusion.

The Radical Welcome Engagement Restoration Model and Assessment Tool for Community-Engaged Partnerships.

People experiencing addiction, houselessness, or who have a history of incarceration have worse health outcomes compared with the general population. This is due, in part, to practices and policies of historically White institutions that exclude the voices, perspectives, and contributions of communities of color in leadership, socio-economic development, and decision-making that matters for their wellbeing. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches hold promise for addressing health inequities. However, full engagement of people harmed by systemic injustices in CBPR partnerships is challenging due to inequities in power and access to resources. We describe how an Allentown-based CBPR partnership-the Health Equity Activation Research Team of clinicians, researchers, and persons with histories of incarceration, addiction, and houselessness-uses the Radical Welcome Engagement Restoration Model (RWERM) to facilitate full engagement by all partners. Data were collected through participatory ethnography, focus groups, and individual interviews. Analyses were performed using deductive coding in a series of iterative meaning-making processes that involved all partners. Findings highlighted six defining phases of the radical welcome framework: (a) passionate invitation, (b) radical welcome, (c) authentic sense of belonging, (d) co-creation of roles, (e) prioritization of issues, and (f) individual and collective action. A guide to assessing progression across these phases, as well as a 32-item radical welcome instrument to help CBPR partners anticipate and overcome challenges to engagement are introduced and discussed.

Survey of the Health of Urban Residents: a Community-Driven Assessment of Conditions Salient to the Health of Historically Excluded Populations in the USA.

BACKGROUND: Data from the Survey of the Health of Urban Residents (SHUR) identified connections between police brutality and medical mistrust, generating significant media, policy, and research attention. Amidst intersecting crises of COVID-19, racism, and police brutality, this report describes survey development and data collection procedures for the SHUR. BASIC PROCEDURES: We conducted focus groups with Black men, Latinxs, and immigrants in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Findings were used to develop and refine measures of conditions salient to the health of urban residents across the country. Quota sampling was employed; oversampling people of color and persons whose usual source of care was not a doctor's office. MAIN FINDINGS: Non-Hispanic Whites made up just under two thirds of the sample (63.65%, n = 2793). Black/African American respondents accounted for 14.2% of the sample (n = 623), while 11.62% (n = 510) were Latinx. Only 43.46% of respondents reported a doctor's office as their usual source of care. Novel measures of population-specific stressors include a range of negative encounters with the police, frequency of these encounters, and respondents' assessments of whether the encounters were necessary. SHUR assessed the likelihood of calling the police if there is a problem, worries about incarceration, and cause-specific stressors such as race-related impression management. PRINCIPAL CONCLUSIONS: SHUR (n = 4389) is a useful resource for researchers seeking to address the health implications of experiences not frequently measured by national health surveillance surveys. It includes respondents' zip codes, presenting the opportunity to connect these data with zip code-level health system, social and economic characteristics that shape health beyond individual factors.

Interrogating academic hegemony in community-based participatory research to address health inequities.

Community-based participatory research holds promise for addressing health inequities. It focuses on issues salient to specific populations, prioritizes community engagement and amplifies the voices of marginalized populations in policy formulation and designing interventions. Although communities are partners, academic hegemony limits their level of influence over the research initiative. Drawing from our own collaborative research experiences, we raise questions for community-engaged health services researchers to reflect upon as a means of interrogating academic hegemony in partnerships that seek to address health inequities. We describe what it means for researchers to acknowledge and relinquish the power they wield in the community-engaged health services research enterprise. We propose three guiding principles for advancing equity: authentic engagement, defining and living values, and embracing accountability.