Community-engaged research (CEnR) can be highly effective when used to create partnerships, challenge the power structures that underly health inequities, and produce community health benefits. Yet even as universities have rolled out initiatives that aim to spotlight and stimulate CEnR, there remain significant institutional and bureaucratic disincentives to seeing CEnR projects to completion. This commentary focuses on institutional barriers to appropriate compensation of community partners. Using our own experiences with CEnR, insights from previous literature, and toolkits from multiple sources, we provide recommendations to universities to help them simplify and clarify the processes they use to finance CEnR and community partnerships.
Stein et al. (2026) studied this question.