Empowering community engagement and involvement in global health research (Apply by Aug 12)

This course is in English

What will you learn?

At the end of this in-person short course you will be able to:

• Design, implement, analyse and ‘make public’ the outcomes of community engagement and involvement in health research from a power-aware perspective.
• Adapt participatory Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) approaches to health research.
• Shape health policy and practice through the application of CEI approaches.
•  Integrate CEI through project and programme life cycles.
• Better empower communities to be actively and thoughtfully engaged in health research processes.
• Develop strategies for creating space within research processes for the meaningful inclusion of a diversity of community members and stakeholders’ perspectives.
• Have a deeper understanding of the intersecting experiences of stigma, marginalisation, and exclusion, so that you can develop contextually grounded and reflexive research and engagement in partnership with communities.
• Demonstrate to the global health research community how you can creatively embed and integrate CEI throughout research processes and wider programmatic functions, including through close collaboration between researchers and communication and public engagement professionals.

More about this training

DATE

From 9 September 2024 until 13 September 2024

VENUE

Institute of Development Studies Library Road Brighton BN1 9RE UK

Increasingly, global health funders require grant recipients to incorporate community engagement and involvement or public engagement and involvement into their research design, implementation, and dissemination approaches.

This course offers an opportunity for participants to work through the thorny questions and challenges that arise when undertaking Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) in practice. It will cover core principles and innovative methodological approaches.

As a CEI practitioner, this in-person training will empower you in your challenging work, helping you to:

• become more strategic in how you position your approaches within global health research consortia and stand-alone projects
• better communicate the outcomes of this work
• use practices of critical reflexivity and complex adaptive management to push the CEI agenda forward more effectively.

This specialist course has the following aims:

• For participants to develop skills, strategies and methods to enable diverse knowledges that ‘count’ in global health research.
• As well as develop strategies to integrate Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) across project life cycles and beyond. 
• To provide a space for critical reflection and supportive peer-to-peer learning for CEI practitioners.

Who should attend this course?

• Community engagement and involvement practitioners who want to build their skills, particularly if they are new to international health research collaborations.
• Participatory research practitioners who are new to working in the health space.
• Public/global health researchers who have some prior experience of working at community level but not yet in the context of co-produced research.

How you will learn

This course will follow the logic of a project or programme life cycle.

Each day we will focus on the principles, methods and approaches relevant to the challenges of distinct phases of undertaking CEI within the context of health research, e.g. establishing trust, community sensemaking, adapting and learning, accountability cycles, collective analysis, and mobilising learning for change.

We will cover topics including:

• Meaningful versus tokenistic forms of CEI
• Ethical dimensions of CEI, including inclusivity in practice
• Shaping health policy and practice through CEI and participatory monitoring and evaluation approaches.

Some of these themes relate to course materials previously developed by IDS for the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). But this course will differ in that it will give you an opportunity to dive more deeply into the issues raised in virtual teaching spaces, and to generate new learning through the peer-to-peer engagement this training provides.

The course will contribute to the learning objectives through modelling – in design and delivery – the approaches and methods we are encouraging you to adopt and integrate into your work.

We will take an adaptive learning approach to our collective learning process, so you will have time for reflection, as well as being given feedback, and adaptation will be built into the five-day cycle.

Who can I contact for more information?

Email: ids [at] ids.ac.uk

Access now

Apply by completing the online application form. Deadline for applications is 16:00 GMT on 12 August 2024.

More information here