Shared Wisdom: How Public Health Researchers and Community Partners Learn and Lead Together

While mentorship is traditionally perceived as top-down where seasoned academics guide earlier career individuals, we assert that mentorship is inherently bi-directional, with multi-perspective exchanges shaping our daily work. Community-engaged research challenges the traditional model by fostering reciprocal mentorship between researchers, students and community members, and this all hinges on trust. Community champions bring invaluable lived experiences, contextual knowledge, and cultural insights to research approaches, assessments, and interventions, making them essential mentors in health behavior research. This paper shares perspectives from a survey of researchers on partnership development and community-engagement. Findings showed the value of community partners as mentors and the role of trust for long-lasting relationships. Over half of faculty engaged communities in research resulting in actionable results addressing quality of life issues. Community-engaged collaborations were beneficial for improving partnership- and grant-related outcomes. We provide recommendations for building trust, setting expectations, and defining roles in community-academic mentorship relationships.