Community Engaged Research

The Community Engagement Research core at CRISP is a reflection of the Wisconsin Idea in action. Rooted in the understanding that research must extend beyond the boundaries of our campus, community engaged research furthers this action by creating reciprocal relationships with communities to solve a pressing problem or effect social change. Promoting trustworthy and productive university-community relationships, our team works with faculty, staff, students, and community partners to advance research for the College of Letters & Science.

Our team collaborates both internally and externally to support interdisciplinary connections between individuals, units and community partners. This strategic work serves as a community-university bridge, and enables high level matchmaking to generate knowledge, relationships, funding, infrastructure and support for community engaged research within L&S. Faculty and staff with a background or interest in including community engaged research in their research or teaching portfolio, or who need assistance with grant applications can consult the associate director and the CRISP team for assistance.

Please note, CEnR/CBR studies often have extended timelines in comparison to traditional research paradigms. Relationships between communities and academic institutions take consistent opportunities and time to build trust, and to attend to power dynamics. Early engagement of our team to help you facilitate new community collaborations, or to advance existing research should be done early in the planning process.

For community members, organizations and collectives, our CRISP team and collaborators at UW-Madison are committed to helping facilitate relationships with researchers and to connect you with programs and resources that can bolster your ideas, and work with you to solve your community identified needs and/or issues. If you have a question or need in your community that could benefit from resources at UW-Madison, please contact us!

Please send an email to Erin Bailey, enbailey@wisc.edu with questions, or consultation requests.

Resources

As community engagement practices and research become an increasingly utilized method in academic research, ensuring equitable and sustainable partnerships in the community-university space is critical to the long term success of communities and researchers alike. The continued growth of the community engaged research community has created a need for additional resources and expertise to support and harness knowledge and capacity.  

UW-Madison has a flourishing community of professionals, programs and departments that are focused on community engagement and community based research.