Research in Action

Resident Researchers and Community Partners use our data and findings to better understand their community strengths and challenges and come up with solutions.  They share findings with community members and leaders to change perspectives and  community conditions. HNS Action Projects build residents and community power to make the  local changes that are most important to their communities. Past projects have sparked resident-led work to increase voting, food distribution, control over land and planning decisions, and healthy housing advocacy. 

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The second principle of PAR says that the best way to understand a problem is by trying to solve it. We created the Learning and Innovation for Community Change (LINC) Lab, which allows partners to use the most relevant data and findings to design and deploy projects and interventions that improve opportunities and conditions within and across HNS communities.

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Over the years, the HNS Consortium has received requests from lots of organizations and advocates who want to do community-based research. Some are new to participatory research and want support to learn to plan and launch such an effort. While others are familiar with PAR, but want support collecting or using specific types of data for action. As we know, there are few resources out there to learn the nuts and bolts of doing a PAR project.  

Our PAR Mentorship program provides opportunities for other communities, and community-based research partnerships to receive mentorship and technical assistance  from members of the HNS consortium, including Resident Researchers. Together, we draw on our collective experience to help them to use PAR in their research.

We offer two forms of mentorship: 

1. PAR Consults – provides short-term advice through one to two meetings with our team(PAR consults are by request)

PAR consults answer questions like – “How do I develop a survey with residents?” “How do you analyze results with residents?” “What are options for sharing data back with our community?” “How do we know if we need an IRB?” 

2. Mentorship – provides an advisory team to guide and support groups in applying PAR to a current community-based research effort

PAR mentorship partners are selected by application once a year 

Interested in Mentorship or a PAR consult? Contact us using the form below:

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Over the years HNS staff have worked with students and researchers to help them build their skill, knowledge, and practice of PAR. The Emerging Scholars program provides doctoral students, post-doctoral students, and community scholars with funding, mentorship from the HNS team, use of HNS data and tools to build their PAR skills and knowledge. Funded scholars use these resources to design and carry out a research or action project that helps answer questions that are valuable to communities.

Interested in the Emerging Scholars Program? Learn more about funded scholars and how to apply below.