Building trust in community-academic partnerships: Strategies for enhancing vaccine confidence and demand - Lessons...

Community engagement is foundational to building community-academic partnerships. Understanding successful strategies for building and maintaining trust in community-academic partnerships can help inform how these partnerships facilitate increased vaccine confidence and demand.

The Vaccine Confidence Network (VCN) process evaluation collected progress and performance data on Prevention Research Centers' (PRCs) work to identify barriers and facilitators to COVID-19 vaccination, increase vaccine confidence and demand in populations of focus, and engage communities. Data were collected mid-cycle (November 2021) and at cycle end (December 2022). Qualitative data were also collected from July-August 2023 for a Community Engagement (CE) study via role-specific interviews with long-standing members of PRC Community Advisory Boards (CABs) and PRC Principal Investigators about creating and nurturing partnerships, trust, and COVID-19 readiness to respond.

Key strategies reported by CABs and PRC investigators for building and maintaining trust in community-academic partnerships included frequent and transparent communication, active engagement of CABs in PRCs' research, ensuring partnerships are bi-directional and mutually beneficial, and investing in relationship building, including long-term commitments with partner organizations. Reported barriers to building trust included historical distrust of academic partners, competing priorities, short funding cycles, and lack of community compensation. Due to longstanding community partnerships, PRCs were seen as reliable sources of COVID-19 information in their communities and were able to help increase vaccine confidence and demand for COVID-19 vaccines through community engagement. They used a variety of strategies, including collaborative intervention development, dissemination of information through trusted messengers, and developing culturally appropriate messaging.

PRCs identified having existing community partnerships as critical to PRC efforts to increase COVID-19 vaccine confidence and demand. The PRC experience identified key strategies and factors related to building trusted community-academic partnerships and highlights the need to develop and validate measures to assess trust across different populations and settings.