As a community-based medical school, the UC Riverside School of Medicine focuses not just on training future physicians but on collaborating with community members to improve health in the area. This effort extends to practicing community-engaged research, an approach in which investigators and community members work together to identify relevant research topics and conduct projects in their community.
A 2020 research review published in a multidisciplinary journal of population health, the Milbank Quarterly, noted that the research method may make findings more applicable to and accepted by the community, build trust that can lead to future research collaborations, and even improve residents’ decision making around their own health.
Leaders in the field of community-engaged scholarship are actively carrying out community-engaged research at the SOM, including Ann Marie Cheney, PhD, academic lead for Unidas por Salud and faculty director of the Coachella Valley Free Clinic; Lisa R. Fortuna, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Neuroscience; and Elizabeth A. Jacobs, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Medicine.
The three of them shared some of their community-based projects and research approaches at the University of California Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration, and Development (UC BRAID) Community Engagement Retreat in September. The first-time event, for which Cheney and Jacobs served on the planning committee, brought together researchers from across the UC system to discuss best practices and foster cross-campus collaboration. “It's important that we as scholars in the UC system have the opportunity to come together to figure out how we can innovate and move the field forward through our more progressive ideas of research,” Cheney said. “We are well aware that we cannot employ traditional models of research in which the academic knows best, and that to have meaningful change, especially around health disparities, we have to do research differently.”
These faculty members’ projects exemplify community research efforts at the SOM. “The work done at UCR was novel and extremely well-received,” said Robert M. Rodriguez, MD, associate dean for clinical research, of their presentations at the UC BRAID retreat.
Cheney: A unique approach to leadership in community research
For the past eight years, Cheney, a faculty member in the SOM’s Department of Social Medicine Population and Public Health, has worked with her community academic partnership team, Unidas por Salud, on a variety of projects. These have focused on health disparities, from chronic disease burden to early childhood obesity prevention to the impact of structural inequities on healthcare service utilization. Research topics built directly on ideas from the community, with projects changing based on residents’ needs.
Even more notable than the specific research projects, Cheney said, is the team’s horizontal leadership structure. “The idea is that members of the community with lived experience or who represent the patient population have the capacity to make decisions around research and be part of the research process,” she explained.
Community members serving on the research team also help them draw participation from less accessible populations, such as the indigenous Mexican Purépecha community. “A lot of times, academics are not very successful at engaging more underserved patient populations because we don't recognize how our own class standing and position in the academy… influences our framework and how we interact with people,” Cheney said. “Many people don't make the time or have the skills or the desire to engage more vulnerable populations because it takes a lot of work,” she added. “You have to spend a lot of time in the community.”
Cheney said the work has changed her own understanding of the purpose of research. While she agreed that research helps generate knowledge and evidence, she said she now also sees it as a tool for empowerment and civic engagement. Her team’s community approach created economic opportunities for those involved, with research team members who previously worked as farmworkers gaining access to new positions. She said the research efforts also increased healthcare access for the community as a whole, as the work led to the creation of the Coachella Valley Free Clinic. “Over time, the community has benefited from the information we generate from research, we then put back into the community via healthcare service delivery or via public health talks,” she said. “We have heard many, many times, ‘thank you so much for doing this work,’ and our team is seen as a trusted entity within the community.”
Fortuna: CAPAZ Community Health Worker Navigation Project
The community leads while UCR serves as the academic partner in Fortuna’s CAPAZ Community Health Worker Navigation Project, a multiyear study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The project, built on a partnership with Cultura y Artes Nativas de las Américas (CANA), focuses on developing a culturally grounded community health worker navigation model and a structural intervention to improve mental health access and support in the community. The NIH initiative was an inaugural program that funded community leaders as the principal investigators and the academic-based scientists as partners. It directly furthers the UCR SOM’s mission of advancing health equity and expanding access to behavioral health in underserved areas.
Fortuna, with a long career in health disparities and services research, began the project while professor and vice chair and chief of psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital. She expanded it to support community-based participatory research across the local region when she joined UCR in 2023. “CAPAZ advances community-engaged research by ensuring that community partners define the priorities, co-design the methods, and guide implementation so the work reflects real needs and cultural strengths,” she said. “This work is built on long-standing relationships, mutual trust, and a commitment to honoring community leadership.”
Fortuna expressed gratitude for CANA and the community health workers’ leadership. “Their collaboration ensures our work remains community-centered, culturally grounded, and impactful for the regions we serve,” she said.
Jacobs: Increasing clinical trial participation, and potential therapies, through community-led research
Jacobs leads a team of collaborators across the SOM and community members whose work focuses on increasing the understanding of regenerative medicine in the Inland Empire. Jacobs explained that research investigating the effectiveness of new therapies like regenerative medicine are often conducted among participants that do not reflect the diversity of individuals, raising questions as to whether these new therapies are applicable to people of other backgrounds. Furthermore, she pointed out that new treatments can worsen health disparities because they’re frequently out of reach financially for lower income individuals.
“The important thing about this work is that it is about helping people understand what clinical trials are, why you'd want to participate in them if you so choose… but just having people be more informed so they can make a better informed decision for themselves and their families,” Jacobs said. “That way, hopefully we’ll know whether these therapies work well in different communities and different populations, because there will be more representative groups or individuals in the trials.”
Approaching the research from a participatory perspective, Jacobs continued, is important to address questions that are important to community members themselves. “Community engagement always helps you be more successful as an investigator, because you're understanding how to talk to the community, you're understanding what matters to the community, and you're building more trust with the community,” she explained. “Especially those communities that have basically had, as they say, helicopter research, where you go in, you do the research, then you leave, and you don't do anything that is meaningful or helpful for the people who you have engaged,” she added. “We know it's so important to do really good science to have communities collaborate; that's why we do it.”
She particularly appreciated the UC BRAID retreat for honoring community partners by allowing them to present together. “They could talk about their experiences and why it's valuable to them,” Jacobs said. “There were community partners from every single organization, and… it's really important that we elevate their voices.”
