Steering Committee on Community-Partnered Research

Originally launched in 2005 as the Steering Committee on Community Projects within the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program at Yale, in 2015 it became the community research leadership board for all CBPR research across Yale School of Medicine. Members include representation from local government, executive directors of regional community-based organizations, and dean-level representation from four academic institutions within Greater New Haven. To ensure representation of broad perspectives, over half of the Steering Committee are non-Yale affiliated, and members possess expertise across various disciplines, expanding reach and impact. True to its original mission, the Steering Committee still provides oversight of the community-engaged research curriculum of the Yale National Clinician Scholars Program (NCSP) that educates both physicians and postdoctoral nurses to become leaders and innovators in health care, community health, and public policy. The Steering Committee facilitates the collaboration of community organizations with trainees to design and implement research and interventions on topics identified as priorities by community members. It also provides a framework for multidisciplinary initiatives and models of engagement and disseminates successful strategies geared to building a healthier community, improving care delivery systems, training a new workforce, and implementing impactful health policy.

The Steering Committee is committed to helping guide authentic partnerships, working to identify research barriers among marginalized communities, and contributing to recommendations on addressing those barriers. The Steering Committee brings academic and community partners together to align community-based research and learning activities across Greater New Haven’s institutions of higher learning with the goal to improve coordination and community benefit.

The Steering Committee seeks to improve the health and well-being of community members through partnered scholarship that respects the expertise of community leaders and academicians, as well as the situated and lived expertise of residents. The Steering Committee is grounded in four core values:

1. Equitable engagement of communities and academic researchers, especially in issues of governance, budget, and implementation;
2. Respect for and recognition of varied expertise and experience;
3. Transparency along the research process from budget to design to dissemination;
4. Commitment to the development of human capital.