Collaboration | Co-Creation | Capacity Building | Communication
The Community-Engaged Research, Action, and Partnerships (CERAP) unit is led by an interdisciplinary team of community engaged faculty and researchers who are committed to advancing community-driven research that improves lives, strengthens communities, and benefits society. Community-university partnerships—also referred to as engaged or public scholarship—are collaborations between community-based groups and higher education institutions working together to co-create new knowledge, policies, and/or practices that promote individual and social transformation. Our approach involves community members and university researchers as partners, and it is grounded in our commitment to co-investigation, co-creation, and co-learning.
The "Community Engaged Research Map" outlines a model for collaboration between university researchers and community members to co-investigate pressing social issues. It is represented as a sequence of five colored arrows, each symbolizing a phase in the research partnership process. Below these arrows, a horizontal orange arrow labeled “Ongoing negotiation of power with attention to justice & equity” spans the entire process.
Phases and Content:
- Personal & Professional Development: Ongoing commitment to learning and self-development.
- Cultural humility
- Asset perspective
- Positionality and reflexivity
- Communication
- Readiness assessments
- Historical and contextual background
- Community-based research theory & practice
- Establishing Partnerships: Background learning and relationship building.
- Community entry
- Trust building
- Values alignment
- Build shared culture
- Bidirectional communication
- Collaboratively identify priorities and goals
- Identify roles and expectations
- MOUS/agreements
- Establish foundation of justice and equity
- Study Design: Research planning and co-design for democratic participation.
- Ethics training and certification
- Sharing expertise
- Community advisory boards
- Determine RQs, methods, and analysis plans
- Include relevant stakeholders
- Identify capacity and TA needs
- Transparent processes and practices
- Conduct Cycles of Collaborative Inquiry: Select effective channels to engage target audience and participatory methods for co-learning.
- Reinforce collaborative team-based practices for all project phases
- Gather information
- Collect data
- Analyze data
- Interpret data
- Assess and engage additional stakeholders
- Generate key findings
- Identify desired actions and change targets
- Outcomes & Sustainability: Sharing findings and taking action.
- Identify target groups and stakeholders for dissemination
- Co-create strategies for sharing research findings
- Amplify community collaborators' expertise in dissemination process
- Mobilize communities for action
- Emphasize reciprocity and sustainability
Aims
The Community-Engaged Research, Action, and Partnerships (CERAP) is focused on increasing the Social Science Research Institute’s capacity to:
- advance community engaged research,
- promote ethical, healthy, and sustainable community-university partnerships,
- build community engaged research capacity, and
- disseminate research findings and take action to address community-identified priorities and pressing social issues
What We Do
- Consultations and collaborations
- Trainings
- Resource hub for community and university researchers
- Tool and method development
- Events and speaker series
- Community and university capacity building
- Institutional change work
CERAP Seed Grant
CERAP has launched their Community-Engaged Research Partnership Development Seed Grant Program! Level 1 awards will provide a maximum of $5,000, while Level 2 awards will provide a maximum of $20,000. Request for proposals can be submitted here. Key dates are listed below:
- Applications Due: April 1, 2026 by 11:59pm
- Funding Announcements: May 1, 2026
- CERAP Summer Institute: June 2-3, 2026
- Funding Begins: July 1, 2026
More information about the Seed Grant can be found in the webinar we hosted on Tuesday, February 17th.
Monthly Huddles
What is the Huddle?
The Huddle is a community of practice for Penn State faculty who share a commitment to equitable, sustainable, reciprocal, transformative community-engaged research. The goal of this community of practice is to build relationships with others who are passionate about co-creating research with community members and want to learn how to do it better. Through regular gatherings, we will share ideas, resources, tools, and build a culture of support. Building on our collective knowledge and expertise, the topics and themes for each session will come from faculty who are invited to present ongoing work, workshop a dilemma or challenge, pilot measures, share resources, lead topical discussions, practice activities, and more! We invite our Penn State colleagues to join us to build the Huddle as a space for supportive relationships and capacity building.
Upcoming Huddle Dates:
- March 20, 2026
- April 10, 2026
- May 15, 2026
The monthly Huddles are hybrid events. In-person room details (at University Park) and Zoom link will be provided upon RSVP each month.
Please note that providing a hybrid virtual/in-person format reflects our commitment to ensuring equitable access to opportunities for capacity building to the university-wide community across the Commonwealth
Innovation Hub
Community-engaged research (CEnR) has burgeoned over the past two decades, characterized by a paradigm shift from doing work on communities to doing work with communities. Evolving from niche to conventional, this methodological approach centers equity and addresses social concerns through partnership. As universities focus on public, engaged scholarship, it is essential that scholars and community members have the capacity to critically engage in this space. The 2026 Child Study Center (CSC) Innovation Hub symposium, Community Engaged Research for Public Impact: Process to Policy, provided a forum to do this. This year's CSC Innovation Hub was held on Friday, February 6th and was co-sponsored by SSRI and the CERAP Unit. The morning symposium focused on CEnR perspectives, methods, and approaches with diverse populations, in multiple geographies, across the lifespan. A smaller afternoon session brought together community members and Penn State researchers to brainstorm and ideate ways to utilize CEnR methodologies to improve lives through dissemination, as well as community and youth-engaged intervention and prevention programming and policies.
2025 Workgroup Launch Meeting Report
An interactive and collaborative event to discuss emerging trends in community engaged research (CEnR), participatory action research and community-research partnerships. We discussed Engagement building and sustaining partnerships, ethics, CEnR design and evaluation, identifying community priorities and strengthening the fabric of our communities through change.
Co-Directors
Steering Committee Members
- Mallika Bose, Landscape Architecture
- Kristina Brant, Rural Sociology
- Sarah Brothers, Sociology and Public Policy
- Jochebed Gayles, Health and Human Development
- Justine Lindemann, Community Development and Resilience
- Raffy Luquis, School of Behavioral Sciences and Education, Penn State Harrisburg
- Mark Ortiz, Geography
- Harrison Pinckney, Recreation, Park and Tourism Management
- Jessica Thompson, Health Policy and Administration
