Institutional transformations for authentic community engaged and participatory research

This special issue of the Journal of Clinical Translational Science on Institutional Transformation provides strategies to strengthen community and patient engagement in research in which collaborative knowledge creation is valued and centered in the history, knowledge, and evidence within communities. Recognizing the important role of academic health centers, schools of public health and research institutes in engaged research, the guest editors sought articles that challenged institutions to transform policies, practices, norms and structures towards power-sharing in research and towards commitment to sustainable research partnerships for health equity. While these articles were mostly written before the current context of large-scale terminations of grants and programs, this special issue recognized the well-founded historical distrust of communities in academic centers and the ongoing challenges of regaining trust in science. We first provide an historical context of institutional barriers and facilitators of engaged and participatory research and then review articles, including from the Engage for Equity PLUS national initiative. We end with recommendations for the field, as we recognize we still need to be self-critical about the structures that maintain academic dominance in research rather than valuing multiple ways of knowing and the importance of communities for authentic co-creation and leadership of research.