Community Ecosystem Mapping: A Foundational Step for Effective Community Engagement in Research and Knowledge Mobilization.

Community engagement is a key strategy for achieving various goals, such as social and environmental change, sustainable development, health promotion, and community building. It involves collaborations and partnerships with the community that help mobilize resources, impact systems, rectify partner dynamics, and function as catalysts for modifying policies, programs, and practices. It also ensures mutual trust among all parties involved, giving community members greater personal agency and involvement potential. We have learned a range of practical aspects of community engagement with communities, particularly with immigrant/racialized communities, by running a community-engaged program of research on the health and wellness issues of immigrant/racialized communities in Calgary, Canada. In this article, we focus on a crucial early step of community engagement-understanding the community ecosystem. The community ecosystem refers to its human, social, and cultural makeups. Understanding this ecosystem requires conscious efforts to comprehend the demography, participate in socio-cultural events, identify community spots, reach out to hard-to-access groups, find the community champions and communication channels/organizations, and reaching out to them to establish relationships. Understanding the community ecosystem allows us to identify the pivotal factors, key actors, and pulse of the community that we are engaging with. This enables us to build mutual trust and goals for research and knowledge mobilization. Subsequently, an empowered, continual, and collaborative partnership becomes possible, resulting in sustained and desirable outcomes.

Employing diffusion of innovation theory for 'not missing the mass' in community-engaged research.

INTRODUCTION: Engaging with minority communities, such as immigrants and ethnic minorities, often involves adopting top-down approaches, wherein researchers and policymakers provide solutions based on their perspective. However, these approaches may not adequately address the needs and preferences of the community members, who have valuable insights and experiences to share. Therefore, community-engaged approaches, which involve collaborative partnerships between community members and researchers to identify issues, co-create solutions, and recommend policy changes, are becoming more recognized for their effectiveness and relevance. Yet, prevailing community engagement efforts often focus on easily reachable and already engaged segments of the community, sometimes overlooking the broader population. METHODS: When working with immigrant and racialized communities, we encountered difficulties in engaging the wider community through traditional researcher-led approaches. We realized that overcoming these challenges required innovative strategies rooted in community-based participatory research principles and the diffusion of innovation theory. We recognized that a nuanced understanding of the community's dynamics and preferences was crucial in shaping our approach and building trust and rapport with the community members. RESULTS: The need to bridge the gap between researcher-led initiatives and community-driven involvement has never been more pronounced. Our experience, chronicled in this article, highlights the journey of our research program with an immigrant/racialized community. This reflection enhances our comprehension of community engagement that deliberately strives to reach a larger cross-section of the community. By providing practical methods for reaching the broader community and navigating the intricacies of engagement, we aim to assist fellow researchers in conducting effective community-engaged research across various minority communities. CONCLUSION: In sharing our insights and successful strategies for community engagement, we hope to contribute to the field's knowledge. Our commitment to fostering meaningful collaboration underscores the importance of co-creating solutions that resonate with the diverse voices within these communities. Through these efforts, we envision a more inclusive and impactful approach to addressing the complex challenges faced by minority populations.

Conceptualising community engagement as an infinite game implemented through finite games of 'research', 'community organising' and 'knowledge mobilisation'.

Meaningful community engagement process involves focusing on the community needs, building community capacity and employing culturally tailored and community-specific strategies. In the current practices of community-engaged health and wellness research, generally, community engagement activities commence with the beginning of a particular research project on a specific topic and end with the completion of the project. The outcomes of the community engagement, including the trust, partnership and contribution of the community to research, thus remain limited to that specific project and are not generally transferred and fostered further to the following project on a different topic. In this viewpoint article, we discussed a philosophical approach to community engagement that proposes to juxtapose community engagement for the specific short-term research project and the overarching long-term programme of research with the finite game and infinite game concepts, respectively. A finite game is a concept of a game where the players are known, rules are fixed and when the agreed-upon goal is achieved, the game ends. On the other hand, in infinite games, the players may be both known and unknown, have no externally fixed rules and have the objective of continuing the game beyond a particular research project. We believe community engagement needs to be conducted as an infinite game that is, at the programme of research level, where the goal of the respective activities is not to complete a research project but to successfully engage the community itself is the goal. While conducting various research projects, that is, finite games, the researchers need to keep an infinite game mindset throughout, which includes working with the community for a just cause, building trust and community capacity to maximise their contribution to research, prioritising community needs and having the courage to lead the community if need be. Patient or Public Contribution: While preparing this manuscript, we have partnered actively with community champions, activists, community scholars and citizen researchers at the community level from the very beginning. We had regular interactions with them to get their valuable and insightful inputs in shaping our reflections. Their involvement as coauthors in this paper also provided a learning opportunity for them and facilitated them to gain insight on knowledge engagement. All authors support greater community/citizen/public involvement in research in an equitable manner.

Injury among the immigrant population in Canada: exploring the research landscape through a systematic scoping review.

BACKGROUND: Injuries are the leading cause of death among younger Canadians and represent a large economic burden on the Canadian population. Although immigrants comprise more than 20% of the Canadian population, the research landscape on injury in this group is unclear. We conducted a scoping review to summarize existing research regarding injuries among Canadian immigrants to identify research gaps and future research opportunities. METHODS: Relevant electronic databases of peer-reviewed articles and grey literature were systematically searched. Original articles were selected based on predefined criteria. Relevant information from the articles was extracted and reported in the review. RESULTS: After a comprehensive search, screening and full-text evaluation, 28 articles were selected for the synthesis. Of the injuries that have been studied among Canadian immigrants, the majority focused on occupational injuries, followed by road traffic accidents. Of the 28 studies, 16 were quantitative and 12 were qualitative. The research themes among occupational injury papers centred on factors leading to injury, factors leading to delayed reporting and compensation of injury and post-occupational injury experiences. Language barriers, informal training and the mismatch between education and occupation among immigrants were found to be the most frequent determinants of injury risk. CONCLUSIONS: The synthesized knowledge in this scoping review offers an understanding of the current research landscape on injury among immigrants that can be used to assist policymakers, service providers, employers and researchers regarding injuries in this population.