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.

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.

Partnering with organisations beyond academia through strategic collaboration for research and mobilisation in immigrant/ethnic-minority communities.

Community-engaged research needs involving community organisations as partners in research. Often, however, considerations regarding developing a meaningful partnership with community organisations are not highlighted. Researchers need to identify the most appropriate organisation with which to engage and their capacity to be involved. Researchers tend to involve organisations based on their connection to potential participants, which relationship often ends after achieving this objective. Further, the partner organisation may not have the capacity to contribute meaningfully to the research process. As such, it is the researchers' responsibility to build capacity within their partner organisations to encourage more sustainable and meaningful community-engaged research. Organisations pertinent to immigrant/ethnic-minority communities fall into three sectors: public, private and non-profit. While public and private sectors play an important role in addressing issues among immigrant/ethnic-minority communities, their contribution as research partners may be limited. Involving the non-profit sector, which tends to be more accessible and utilitarian and includes both grassroots associations (GAs) and immigrant service providing organisations (ISPOs), is more likely to result in mutually beneficial research partnerships and enhanced community engagement. GAs tend to be deeply rooted within, and thus are often truly representative of, the community. As they may not fully understand their importance from a researcher's perspective, nor have time for research, capacity-building activities are required to address these limitations. Additionally, ISPOs may have a different understanding of research and research priorities. Understanding the difference in perspectives and needs of these organisations, building trust and creating capacity building opportunities are important steps for researchers to consider towards building durable partnerships.

Involving im/migrant community members for knowledge co-creation: the greater the desired involvement, the greater the need for capacity building.

Researchers need to observe complex problems from various angles and contexts to create workable, effective and sustainable solutions. For complex societal problems, including health and socioeconomic disparities, cross-sectoral collaborative research is crucial. It allows for meaningful interaction between various actors around a particular real-world problem through a process of mutual learning. This collaboration builds a sustainable, trust-based partnership among the stakeholders and allows for a thorough understanding of the problem through a solution-oriented lens. While the created knowledge benefits the community, the community is generally less involved in the research process. Often, community members are engaged to collect data or for consultancy and knowledge dissemination; however, they are not involved in the actual research process, for example, developing a research question and using research tools such as conducting focus groups, analysis and interpretation. To be involved on these levels, there is a need for building community capacity for research. However, due to a lack of funds, resources and interest in building capacity on the part of both researchers and the community, deeper and meaningful involvement of community members in research becomes less viable. In this article, we reflect on how we have designed our programme of research-from involving community members at different levels of the research process to building capacity with them. We describe the activities community members participated in based on their needs and capacity. Capacity-building strategies for each level of involvement with the community members are also outlined.

Meaningful and deep community engagement efforts for pragmatic research and beyond: engaging with an immigrant/racialised community on equitable access to care.

Primary healthcare access is one of the crucial factors that ensures the health and well-being of a population. Immigrant/racialised communities encounter a myriad of barriers to accessing primary healthcare. As global migration continues to grow, the development and practice of effective strategies for research and policy regarding primary care access are warranted. Many studies have attempted to identify the barriers to primary care access and recommend solutions. However, top-down approaches where the researchers and policy-makers 'prescribe' solutions are more common than community-engaged approaches where community members and researchers work hand-in-hand in community-engaged research to identify the problems, codevelop solutions and recommend policy changes. In this article, we reflect on a comprehensive community-engaged research approach that we undertook to identify the barriers to equitable primary care access among a South Asian (Bangladeshi) immigrant community in Canada. This article summarised the experience of our programme of research and describes our understanding of community-engaged research among an immigrant/racialised community that meaningfully interacts with the community. In employing the principles of community-based participatory research, integrated knowledge translation and human centred design, we reflect on the comprehensive community-engaged research approach we undertook. We believe that our reflections can be useful to academics while conducting community-engaged research on relevant issues across other immigrant/racialised communities.

Social Media as a Platform for Information About Diabetes Foot Care: A Study of Facebook Groups.

BACKGROUND: Diabetes is one of the most challenging chronic health conditions in the current era. Diabetes-related foot problems need proper patient education, and social media could a play role to disseminate proper information. METHOD: A systematic search was performed on Facebook groups using the key words "diabetes foot care", "diabetes foot", "diabetes foot management" and "podiatric care". The search resulted in 57 groups and detailed activity information was collected from those groups. Usefulness of each relevant post was determined. Regression analysis was performed to explore the factors associated with the level of usefulness of diabetes foot care-related Facebook groups. RESULTS: Our search resulted in a total of 16 eligible diabetes foot care-related Facebook groups with a total of 103 eligible posts. The average number of group members for the selected groups were 265.75 with an interquartile range of 3.5-107.75. Of the total 103 timeline posts, 45.6% posts were categorized as useful, while the remaining posts were not useful. Top mentioned diabetes foot care practice was "Checking feet daily". Multivariable logistic regression analysis showed that the level of usefulness of diabetes foot care-related Facebook groups were significantly associated with the type of posts and no association was found with presence of "likes" and presence of comment. CONCLUSION: Facebook being a widely used social networking system, patient welfare organizations, doctors, nurses and podiatrists could use this platform to provide support to educating diabetes patients and their caregivers by disseminating useful and authentic knowledge and information related to diabetes foot care.