Funding Programs Relevant to Spinal Cord Injury Research and Their Approaches to Research Partnerships: An Environmental Scan

Background: Establishing research partnerships can help close the research-practice gap. The Integrated Knowledge Translation Guiding Principles were developed in a spinal cord injury research context as a resource to facilitate research partnerships. Research funders play a significant role in the spinal cord injury research system. However, how funders define, require, evaluate, support research partnerships is rarely reported. This study identified spinal cord injury research funders in Canada and the United States, identified their approaches to supporting research partnerships, and explored organizational perspectives of principles of partnership. Methods: An environmental scan was conducted through five steps: (1) identifying spinal cord injury research organizations that funded the greatest number of spinal cord injury research publications in Canada and the United States between 2017 and 2022; (2) identifying one funding program related to research partnerships of each funder; (3) extracting online information of the programs; (4) interviewing funder informants; and (5) descriptive and deductive content analysis. The five steps were completed between April 2022 and September 2024. An additional data collection was conducted in July 2025 on a relevant National Institutes of Health funding program. Results: Sixteen organizations and seventeen partnership-supportive programs were identified. Six programs defined partnerships as researchers and research users engaging throughout the research process. Eleven programs required applicants to describe the partnership in applications and explicitly stated their peer review evaluation criteria. The programs supported research partnerships through remuneration for partners’ engagement (n=6), facilitating connections between researchers and potential partners (n=3), and helping applicants prepare applications (n=4). The programs had few strategies to evaluate awarded partnerships post-grant. Three descriptive categories emerged from the interviews: (1) Varied support for research partnerships; (2) Minimal capacity for partnership evaluation post-grant; and (3) Need for tools and resources to further support research partnerships. Conclusion: Differences existed in how spinal cord injury research funders in Canada and the United States defined, required, evaluated, and supported research partnerships. The results provided an initial landscape of funders’ role in the spinal cord injury research system and may inform strategic efforts to optimizing meaningful engagement in a broader health research context.