A new open-access book chapter from CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy researchers Danielle Greene (Senior Advisor to PRI), Deborah Levine (Community Convening and Learning Team faculty member), and Kamrun Nahar (PRI Community Engagement and Operations Manager) lays out what lasting community partnership requires and why so many public health efforts fall short.
Published by IntechOpen, the chapter, Raising the Bar in Community Partnerships: Principles of Co-Design and Sustainability, argues that communities are too often brought in late, asked to react to pre-set plans, or placed in advisory roles with limited power. The authors describe how this creates transactional relationships that erode trust and undermine long-term impact.
The chapter also highlights a PRI example: the Community Convening and Learning Team developed a compensation model to support community-centered work across research, programming, and preparedness activities.
The Essentials of True Partnership
The chapter names five guiding principles for successful community-engaged work:
- Respect for lived experience
- Early and continuous engagement
- Shared power and decision-making
- Transparency
- Long-term trust-building
Key Takeaways
Alongside the principles, the chapter is explicit about what implementation looks like in practice:
- Co-design is not consultation. Community members should help shape the problem, goals, methods, and interpretation from the beginning.
- Compensation and credit-sharing are not optional extras. The chapter calls for fair compensation models that recognize community expertise and for recognition through authorship, acknowledgement, and visibility.
- Institutions can be the barrier. The chapter details structural obstacles like topic-driven funding streams, time-limited grants that work against sustainability, and academic incentive systems that undervalue relationship-building and shared authorship.
- Recommendations focus on changing the system, not just behavior, including institutionalizing co-design, investing in relationship infrastructure, and shifting from transactional to transformational engagement.
The chapter is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, making it free to read and share with proper citation. To explore the full framework, examples, and recommendations, visit IntechOpen and read the complete chapter: Raising the Bar in Community Partnerships: Principles of Co-Design and Sustainability (DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1013843).