Building Social Contracts with Communities Posted on February 28, 2006 John Landsverk (bio) describes how he and his colleagues have fostered relationships with community groups.

These are the structures or the ways that I built what I've come to think of a social contract with community groups that are participating. One is I and my colleagues have always tried to include agency managers as co-investigators in the study. Not only to name them as an advisory group, but to structurally put them in as co-investigators. That's an important language, and it says that they're co-equal from that point of view.

Two is in this first study we developed an approach to where we use child welfare and mental health system participants on the research team. They were enormously helpful because to tell you the truth, I knew very little about foster care.

The third thing is I believe money is really important as an exchange between collaborating partners, and so what we did was I put a sub-contract on that went to mental health because they indicated that they were really short of help.

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