Prioritizing Research Team Infrastructure and Well-Being: Structural Healing in a CBPR Mental Health Intervention Study with Latine Newcomers

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) offers a transformative framework for designing and implementing mental health interventions among newcomers, particularly forcibly displaced people with compounding stressors. However, maintaining meaningful participatory processes during the implementation phase of intervention studies is challenging. As part of the praxis of the Immigrant Well-being Project (IWP), a study that involved adapting and implementing an evidence-based mental health intervention for Latine newcomers, the community-university research team took detailed notes at research team meetings and retreats, maintained a decision log, and engaged in ongoing critical reflection and discussion on CBPR processes from 2017 to 2023. Through critical reflective analysis, we identified three participatory priorities: (1) maintaining flexibility and responsive research team infrastructure; (2) addressing emergent structural constraints; and (3) centering individual and collective well-being as dynamic practices. We also identified multiple practices that enabled the team to maintain each priority, as well as the impacts these priorities and practices had on research team members. By attending to these structural conditions and the well-being of research team members, a form of structural healing was enacted to redistribute epistemic power and affirm the dignity of community members historically marginalized within healthcare and research settings.