Building Sustainable Organizational and Community Capacity for Research Partnerships: A Decade of Experience

The purpose of this article is to share community partner perspectives of impact and lessons learned from a decade long community-academic partnership between the Collaborative Center for Health Equity at the University of Wisconsin Madison, and the United Community Center/Centro de la Comunidad Unida, a nonprofit community-based organization providing services across the lifespan for Latino communities of Milwaukee. The partnership was established in 2010 to support bidirectional communication, trust building and mutual benefit though community engaged research and collaborative student teaching. Over the years, we have achieved a variety of outcomes on both sides of the partnership. For our community organization, the partnership has evolved to create substantial benefits through opportunities for new collaborations, service program development and grantsmanship. Several factors contributed to our success including sustained stable funding not tied to an individual research project and academic investment in community capacity.