Modeling Your Partnership

Our CBPR Conceptual Model seeks to capture the context and range of processes and outcomes of CBPR and community-engaged research projects. Each individual domain is important. Partnerships are deeply-embedded in complex community and societal contexts. Partnering processes reflect intentions to be equitable. Communities that play an active role in research can enhance interventions and research designs. Their involvement leads to outcomes related to capacity and system changes, that in turn produce long-term outcomes that transform communities and improve health equity.

The model, however, is more than its individual parts. It reflects dynamic processes that interact with each other. As such, it can promote reflection on our own actions and practices to strengthen what we do. It is based on a perspective advanced by Paulo Freire: the idea that we, as diverse partnering stakeholders, need to engage with each other as equals in creating knowledge. This idea of shared power needs to be realized every day in our interactions, as well as in our intentions to create and recreate a more equitable and healthy society.