Research Week: Partnering with Purpose

Research funders, organizations and people with lived experience increasingly expect researchers to partner with knowledge users throughout the research process. However, the current academic system provides significant barriers to partnering for both researchers and community members. Meaningful engagement—allowing individuals to partner with purpose—requires systemic change.

This workshop is for those who want to learn more about how to partner, improve existing partnerships, understand the barriers to partnership, examine ways to deal with the burdens of partnership and better understand how to meaningfully engage partners throughout the research process.

Workshop participants will gain insight into the fundamentals of partnership, identify barriers to partnership and learn keys to transforming research systems, including:

• supporting and valuing research partnerships,
• combating tokenism,
• creating accountability mechanisms,
• incentivizing collaborative research,
• providing education and training for partnership skills, and
• recognizing the quality of engagement, not just research outputs.

Finally, participants will learn about the real-life successful partnership between UBC Okanagan and the City of Kelowna, putting theory into practice.

Register here