Wendy constantly reaches out to the Indigenous community she is working with for input
Transcript
Well a true partnership is where the idea – the problem that the research is addressing has been co-determined by both, and again that’s the voice, I mean really it’s more determined by the community; and then … having their – I don’t expect the people in the community to be writing the grants to get the funds because a lot of times we talk about capacity-building in the community but they’re not interested in capacity-building to be research grant writers, you know, they’re building capacity to improve health services to improve the health and wellbeing of their community; so the researcher, you know, we do our academic piece on that side and then – but having them in agreement, so making sure that the direction and the methods that we say we’re going to use are actually consistent with the workings of the community and the values of the community and the flow of the community.
So then with that, so the proposal and submitting for the funding, having in the actual budget a large chunk of the money to go to the community because they’re doing the work; so the partnership-. It’s not the $25 gift card to come and participate in an interview. It’s actually money going into the community that they can use to have staff to support the researchers and the coordinators. So having staff in the community I think that’s a really important piece of a partnership because otherwise nothing is going to happen and if it is it’s going to be all driven again from the researcher sitting in the university office, so having the partnership people have to be on the ground in the community actually as part of their work is working on the research; and then the data collection analysis having their involvement.
Then a complete open discussion about how dissemination of results is going to look, and again having – when we – you know as part of a researcher it’s important that we disseminate our results. We have a responsibility to do that, an ethical responsibility not only to our funder but to our participants but it’s not from the researcher’s side, the community partners are part of that. They’re part of the presentation having done presentations with us, having them give input on publications and having their names on them, absolutely that’s also part of the partnership.
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