Strengthening Federal Programs and Practices through Community Engagement

Community engagement in research involves collaborating with community members as integral partners and valuing lived experience as essential expertise. But the federal context can introduce unique complexity to undertaking community-engaged research due to some of the characteristics of federally funded projects, such as their scale, multisite nature, and contracting requirements. Some federal staff may feel unequipped to use such methods. This Urban Institute report summarizes results from an environmental scan of federal research and evaluation projects conducted in the past ten years that involved community engagement. The report summarizes findings from two key activities:

• identifying and documenting example federal research projects that incorporate community-engaged methods; and
• assembling and soliciting feedback from a community advisory board on several specific Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation practices, processes, and materials.