Power Imbalances Posted on March 19, 2007 Ellen Goldstein (bio) speaks about the differing priorities of researchers and communities.

Funding has its own culture of needing to, for the funders needing to market their initiatives so that they need to have really good dissemination products, they need to have things written out well, they need to be able to market that they've done this great program.

Community-based agencies tend to have a priority of looking at the individual person in front of them in the moment and the focus is on the here and now. Academics tend to have, well I can get this out in three years and then maybe the following year I'll publish it, so the timeframe is really different, the priorities are really different and getting those three to understand that they're not bad and wrong, that the folks on the other side are not, or people who they're collaborating with aren't evil or lazy or, or imperious or what have you, but just have a very different cultural context in which to work.

But the other thing we have to remember is that there is a power hierarchy. Funders have more power, academics have more power and so when you're talking about resources and you're talking about who gets to define the program, quite often community-based organizations are in the one or two-down position and anything to do to turn over that power imbalance is really important.

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