Time, trust, and relationships: Creating a culture of community engagement to advance translational research through resource allocation, modeling, and recognition

Advancing community engagement and participatory research approaches necessitates shifting cultural norms. The paper describes a program designed to explicitly embed and reinforce a culture of engagement through resource allocation, modeling, and recognition that was initiated by a Clinical and Translational Science Institute Community Engagement Program CE Program. Resources were allocated to the relationship development process between researchers and community partners. Funded partnerships were provided with guidance to support the equitable distribution of resources. Partnerships received additional reinforcement through participation in a learning collaborative, intended to support community partnership development, model best practices in community engagement and to build a network of community engaged, and participatory researchers at the institution. Investigators reported the learning collaborative "gave them permission" to focus on the process. Overall, lessons learned indicate embedding and reinforcing practices that center relationship and reward time spent building partnerships is a promising strategy to buffer against cultural norms that favor outcomes and over process.