• Home
• About ALIVE
• ALIVE Staff
• Press Room
• Publications
• Community-Based Scholarship
• CBS Projects
• Service-Learning
• $100 Solution
• Online Resources
• CP Incentives
• WKU Engagement
• Volunteerism
• Youth Volunteers
• Event Volunteers
• Ongoing Volunteer Opportunities
• Nonprofit Directory
• Support Groups
• Events/Workshops
• Nonprofit Jobs
• Resources
• Meeting Space
• VISION

Community Based-Scholarship

"We see CBR as a tool, a teaching technique, and an institutional change strategy for social justice, engaging universities' and communities' human resources, expertise, and knowledge-generating capabilities to address social ills. The distributive combination of collaborative inquiry, critical analysis, and social change that community-based research represents – as well as its potential to unite the three traditional academic missions of teaching, research, and service in innovative ways – has led us to believe that CBR is a next important stage of service-learning and engaged scholarship." – Community-Based Research and Higher Education (2003, Strand et. al)

Community-based research is a collaborative, change-oriented approach to research that equitably engages all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings.  CBR is research that is conducted with and for, not on, members of a community. CBR begins with a research topic based in the needs of communities, has the aim of combining knowledge with action and achieving social change on behalf of disadvantaged communities or groups.

CBR is based on the fundamental principle that university/community partnerships can produce new culturally-situated knowledge and action to promote social justice and equity. CBR is dedicated to democratizing research, and to rendering research methods and results transparent and usable for making local knowledge explicit, creating new local knowledge, supporting cultural conservation, promoting social activism and contributing local voices to social science advancement. In the face of national and international efforts to disseminate science based intervention models, CBR offers promise for effectively adapting research-based interventions to local needs and cultural strengths and constraints. Ideally, CBR involves all partners in the research process from beginning to end, but the realities of work in the field show that negotiated participation, as part of the collaboration process can produce variation in intensity or participation. The CBR approach resembles other similar approaches that involve community engagement and participatory research, including community-based participatory research (CBPR), participatory action research, (PAR) and action research. Each of these approaches is claimed by different disciplines and reflects slightly different ideal and real modes of implementation. Regardless of whether the emphasis is on partner choices, research methods, or preferred outcomes, partnerships between communities and researchers are an essential component of any meaningful effort to develop synergistic research and social change agendas.