A new paper from RADx-UP reflects on working with community members to build an online resource center.
The article’s focus is on sharing materials with academics and communities on a large scale.
Haily Leiva, the lead author, shared reflections on this work.
What’s important about this work?
This project gave me the opportunity to collect, reflect on and implement stakeholder feedback in a systematic and accountable way.
The image bank project specifically gave me an opportunity to advocate for fair compensation and privacy for community participants.
What do you hope to see come out of this work?
My hope is that our project can serve as a model for other large consortiums and grants for how to share resources and promote collaboration by incorporating community voices.
We’d love to see more examples of community-generated resources, including research measures, recruitment materials, and videos. It’s so important to work with communities when building resources.
What reflections do you want to share about this article?
This was my first time as lead author on a paper!
It was exciting to be able to verbalize my learnings and reflections from several years of work on the RADx-UP project and feel like they add value to others in our field.
My co-authors were also heavily involved in coordinating the Image Bank, so it felt like a time to celebrate and appreciate our accomplishments.
Abstract
RADx-UP, or Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics – Underserved Populations, is a research initiative bringing together community partners and academic teams created through the National Institutes of Health. The program aims to understand factors associated with disparities in COVID-19 testing and vaccination in vulnerable populations across the United States. Multiple strategies were employed within the RADx-UP consortium to improve access to information and resource sharing, including the development of an online engagement resource center. The RADx-UP Engagement Resource Center offers a database of community-engaged COVID-19 materials and other projects, including an Image Bank of community-generated photos, lay-friendly research briefs. Focus groups were held to gather and incorporate community feedback into Engagement Resource Center programming.
This paper aims to reflect on the use of a community-engaged online resource center to develop and disseminate trusted public health resources using a health equity lens, across a nation-wide consortium of stakeholders during a novel pandemic. The RADx-UP Engagement Resource Center can offer an example of how trusted resources related to public health and health equity can be disseminated on a large scale to both community and academic audiences, as well as how community feedback can be incorporated into related programming in future health crises.
The article, “Reflections on the Development of a Nationwide Community-Engaged Resource Center During the COVID-19 Pandemic” is out now in the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship.
Read Reflections on the Developoment of a Nationwise Community-Engaged Resource Center