Panel Discussion 6 - Budget Friendly Breakthroughs: Resourceful Approaches to Launching a Career in Community-engaged Health Research

Community-engaged behavioral science research (CER) is critical to health equity. Yet, CER can be resource intensive in time, finances, and relationship-building. Structural issues hinder the progress of CER. CER is underfunded, and gender, racial, and ethnic inequities exclude diverse scientists as leaders. There is often insufficient infrastructure for community partnerships that impedes scientific progress. These challenges are greater for students/early career scholars, necessitating resourceful and creative science to conduct CER at early career stages. This panel includes scholars across career levels (from graduate student to early career faculty), locations (e.g., India, South Florida, Utah, Caribbean) and academic institutions (research universities, undergraduate-focused colleges, professional schools). Panelists will discuss strategies they have used to conduct CER across topic areas (e.g., intimate partner violence, depression and suicidality, cultural adaptations of interventions, body image) and populations (e.g., racial/ethnic minoritized youth, adults, and families, Latino sexual minority men) with few resources. Illustrative examples include: (1) studying low resource interventions, which could be sustainable outside of research, (2) building trust with organizations (e.g., industry, student services, local nonprofits) that can share resources (e.g., intervention access, materials) for CER that is mutually beneficial, (3) sharing resources across labs (e.g., subscription based services, trained staff), (4) seeking “nontraditional” funding (e.g., institutional funds that are not well-advertised, foundation grants) to rapidly respond to community priorities, (5) providing continued access to intervention, data, or materials and scientific expertise as contributions (e.g., gifting materials after study completion, volunteering with community partners), and (6) using research methods that are efficient and lower burden (e.g., rapid qualitative analysis without transcription, leveraging available data from community partners vs initiating new data collection). Panelists will also discuss structural changes that could help to overcome the inequitable availability of resources for CER.