Applying Community Engagement Principles

The need for more effective and equitable engagement with communities has become increasingly evident to public health professionals in recent years. Now, more than ever, the importance of developing deeper and more engaged academic/institutional-community partnerships is necessary to address systems of structural inequity. However, developing these relationships requires not only knowledge of equity-based partnering formats, but the cultivation of complex skill sets that allow public health practitioners to fully develop relationships across all phases of community collaboration. Two valuable forms of community engagement that public health practitioners and students can make use of are community-based participatory research and service learning, which are the focus of the ACEP seminar. Additionally, this seminar acknowledges that community engagement is a diverse space where people from a variety of professional and personal backgrounds come together and provides knowledge and skills in important interprofessional competencies that are necessary for public ACEP Seminar, 2024 2 of 15 health professionals to understand and be able to deploy. For many years, people working in the technology space have recognized the benefits of “matrixed teams,” similarly over the past few years the notion of interprofessionalism has become an important and required aspect of allied health and public health professional training. Research has shown that bringing together students from two or more professions to learn about, from, and with each other is extremely effective in all forms of collaboration (within research and intervention teams and with communities) and ultimately lead to improved health outcomes. According to the World Health Organization, “Once students understand how to work interprofessionally, they are ready to enter the workplace as a member of the collaborative practice team. This is a key step in moving health systems from fragmentation to a position of strength.” The overall goal of the ACEP seminar is for students to learn about and begin to practice the tenets of three frameworks: Interprofessional Education (IPE), Service-Learning (SL), and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Additionally, students will be supported in problem solving changes /problems that arise during their APEx. With regard to interprofessional engagement, the seminar will provide students with a solid understanding of four key IPE competencies: roles/responsibilities, teams/teamwork, ethics/values,