Realizing the Promise of Community-Based Participatory Research: Community Partners Get Organized!

In their provocative pair of articles, 1,2 the West End Revitalization Association (WERA) and their academic partners articulate a model of community-owned and managed research (COMR) model that is in stark contrast to the university-owned and managed research (UOMR) model that characterizes most research, including most of what is referred to as communitybased participatory research (CBPR). As COMR demonstrates, intellectual spaces exist outside of higher educational and research institutions. Communities can be hubs for discovering new knowledge, generating and testing theories, translating research into action and sharing innovations. If building community capacity, creating and mobilizing knowledge, and achieving social justice are the penultimate goals of CBPR, achieving them may only be possible when communities are at the center of learning, discovery and engagement. Many of the authors ’ criticisms of the UOMR model and the remedies they put in place are reflected in the recommendations and ongoing work of community leaders from across the United States we convened in April 2006 for a Community Partner Summit to advance authentic community-higher education partnerships. 3 Summit participants – a diverse group with years of experience in service-learning, CBPR and community/economic development partnerships with universities – concluded that while combining the knowledge, wisdom and experience in communities and in academe is key to solving the major health, social and economic challenges facing our society, the predominant model of “community-higher education partnership ” is not an authentic partnership and community capacity building and social justice are rarely explicit goals. They urged their peers to