Welcome

Our Mission

The mission of UMass Dartmouth’s Community Research and Partnership Initiative is to bring together faculty, students, and community members to build innovative research partnerships that seek to understand local issues, frame questions, and build capacity to improve socioeconomic, health, educational, and environmental conditions.

Our Mission Principles

• To support and promote community-engaged faculty research and scholarship.
• Ensure that community-engaged scholarship is rewarded.
• To create meaningful and lasting community relationships and partnerships.
• To collaborate with community partners to identify issues and opportunities, and engage in research that leads to actions and applied solutions that respond to challenges confronted by the community.
• To result in increased partnership and research output that has meaningful impacts on communities we serve and furthers the public mission of the university.

Why Community-Engaged Research?

Research partnerships involve a power dynamic that results from who comes up with the research questions, who plans the agenda, who controls the resources, and who benefits most from the partnerships. In the case of community-based research, this has traditionally skewed heavily toward the university or faculty member. However, more national funders are looking to change this dynamic to involve the community partners at earlier stages of developing research questions while seeking outcomes that benefit both the university and the community equally.

UMass Dartmouth, with its rich tradition of service learning courses and community service, is looking to expand its research portfolio by supporting community-engaged research programs. CER occurs in and impacts local and global communities. CER encourages faculty and students to become more civic-minded and think critically about our role in our society and conceptualize our research agendas as having a reciprocal relationship with our communities. CER encourages faculty to help community partners solve problems, enact social justice, navigate socio-political and economic issues, collect and analyze data, and develop skills that they would not otherwise be able to achieve on their own.

CER at UMass Dartmouth also seeks to counterbalance the historically faculty-leaning posture of our university/community relationships by onboarding community partners at the earliest stages of the research process. We seek to incentivize faculty-community collaborative research programs that are attractive to Foundations and government funding agencies, and that further the mission of the university.

What Does CoRPI Do?

CoRPI embraces new perspectives in bringing together robust research programs and community organizations. CoRPI seeks to support researchers who partner with community members and various stakeholders in long term collaborations that engage in qualitative and quantitative, evidence-based research programs that benefit both the university and the social, economic, and ecological well-being of local communities.

Our aim is to leverage the interdisciplinary skills and resources of UMass Dartmouth by connecting to local ways of knowing and situated skillsets within the community. We want to understand problems, brainstorm solutions, and build capacity to sustain and envision new futures together based on research and evidence. We embrace various theoretical approaches and research methodologies and see community partners and researchers as co-equal branches of any collaborative endeavor. Moreover, we recognize that community-engaged research is often interdisciplinary in nature and exists within an undefined continuum between community involvement and researcher control.