Building Intentional Community–Academic Partnerships Before Seeking Funding

Recommendations

Co-design a collaborative partnership and dynamic decision-making process.

Establish your process for partnership and transparency before seeking funding to help solve problems that may arise later. Research funding is an investment of time and labor, and once you secure funding, there may not be time afterward to dedicate to the partnership. 

• Reflection Question: What approach can you use to establish a partnership model for decision-making?

  Consider facilitating open dialogues and co-creation processes that allow all partners to engage in bidirectional decision-making and cultivate a space for shared responsibility. Building mutual trust, agreeing on shared goals, and collaboratively defining roles helps to ensure balanced partnership structures. Additionally, regular reflection sessions and transparent communication practices create opportunities to further strengthen shared decision-making within the partnership.

Identify funding opportunities that align with the partnership’s needs.

• Have an honest conversation with all of the partners involved about how funding can meet their needs. Each partner may have different, very distinct funding needs based on their community or organization type, and meeting these needs is essential for reciprocal participation. 
• Establish a structured process for partners to discuss their needs and priorities before pursuing any new funding. Use these conversations to assess whether a funding opportunity can realistically support each partner’s interests, priority concerns, and requirements. If key needs cannot be met, partners should collectively decide not to pursue that opportunity. By evaluating the fit and feasibility of funding decisions as a united group, the partnership demonstrates a balanced distribution of power, stronger collaboration, and a commitment to mutual respect, shared benefit, and authentic community engagement.

• Reflection Question: What responsive approaches can you take to ensure the community partner’s funding needs are met?

  Assess your organization’s or project’s current priorities and funding allocations to see if your community partner’s needs are being met, and identify opportunities to adjust resources, funding structures, or decision-making processes to better support co-equal partnership. 

Establish the partnership protocols for handling funding, reporting, and data ownership.

• Outline protocols early in partnership development to avoid mixed messages and uncommunicated expectations later. Avoid making assumptions about data management locations or funding distribution responsibilities, as these can negatively impact the partnership dynamic and erode trust.

• Reflection Question: What resources can help you outline your partnership protocols?

  Consider utilizing a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), Data Use Agreement (DUA), or Partnership Agreement template as a guiding resource to outline your partnership protocols. These documents help define shared goals, decision-making processes, communication structures, data use terms and restrictions, and accountability measures.

Check if the funding source protocols are community-centered.

• Review the funding source protocols together (such as reporting and payment protocols) to see if the community partners are expected to learn new platforms that do not align with their usual practices. Often, additional training is required to orient community partners to the funder’s systems, which can require additional compensation to avoid negatively affecting the partnership dynamic.

• Reflection Question: If funding source protocols are not community-centered, what extra training and support can you provide to your community partners?

  Consider the skills and resources that you utilize most when navigating funders’ protocols. Make sure to consider power imbalances and support you could offer to level the playing field — and involve partners in deciding on trainings, ways to adapt your processes to reduce burden, and potential long-term solutions for more community-centered protocols for future funding cycles.

Call to Action

Always approach research preparation as a shared learning process. Begin project planning with intentional engagement and relationship-building, shared decision-making, mutual accountability, and transparency. Use community-centered approaches to guide how decisions are made, how expertise is valued, and how community priorities shape the work.

Key Terms

Trust and trustworthiness in research: Trust and trustworthiness mean a community feels confident that researchers will be honest, respectful, and dependable — and that they’ll act in ways that serve the community, not just themselves or the research (NIH CEAL, NCBI).

Research exploitation: Exploitation occurs when an academic researcher leverages the vulnerability of a community to gain an unfair advantage of the social, economic, psychological, or cultural disadvantages of their subjects, or extracts knowledge for their own benefit, without reciprocity or true partnership ( Resnik, 2002).

Community-centered approach: The community is placed at the forefront of decision-making, drawing on their own experiences, identities, and strengths to define the research needs and working collaboratively throughout the research process (OCJ.org).

Funding source protocols: The documented, established rules, protocols, guidelines, and procedures that a funder (whether federal, state, local, or private) puts into place to ensure the use of funds complies with the funder’s statutory and regulatory requirements, as well as ethical guidelines, oversight and approvals, compliance, and reporting requirements (grants.nih.gov).