First Practical Steps of Collaboration Posted on March 1, 2006 Ann Garland (bio) shares her thoughts on how to begin collaborative community research.

Audience: For someone who has never done collaborative community research before, what are the first practical steps they need to do?

Garland: I think it's a great question. I feel like these relationships take so much time it's hard to even remember back to the beginning. I think that hanging out with, the 'hanging out with' strategy is critical. Meaning, if there's a clinic or a school, now school's harder to just hang out there, but maybe with administrators or with teachers, going to staff meetings obviously with everybody's permission and explicit understanding, but getting to know the culture is critical. So it's getting to know some individuals, but getting to know the culture.

There's no better way to do that, I think, than hanging out at staff meetings. I can't tell you the number of staff meetings I've attended at these clinics and still I learn new dynamics, learn new issues that they're struggling with. I think, again as cliche as it may sound, the listening role in the beginning, so not coming on too strong about having my own agenda.

One thing that I haven't really emphasized but I should, trying to think of what resources or skills you have that may be helpful to that organization, grant writing skills, access to literature. We've run literature searches and reviews for our clinician partners because they're particularly interested in some esoteric medical disorder that one of their clients comes with. We're good at some things in our research center that are useful to them. That's what I meant. Actually that was supposed to key in to the reciprocity issue early on and I forgot. So we do a lot of that, kind of in-kind, what can we offer you?

But there's no substitute for the 'hanging out with' either. Yes, you want to see if you can go to lunch with the principal and that's important. You got to do that, but that alone is never going to do it, because you'll never get to know the culture of the schools. You'll never get to understand what the teachers are dealing with by going to lunch with the top administrators whether it's schools or mental health or otherwise.

« Back to Article