ABSTRACT
Empowerment-based research involves many stakeholders including university partners (faculty and students) along with community partners (members from all levels of the organization). In this chapter, we explain how community-based participatory research (CBPR) is different from other research paradigms and the importance of CBPR for engaging in community-based research. We describe evaluation tools you can use in your own action-based research including conducting needs assessments, SWOT analyses, and SMARTER goals analyses. We describe a five-year action-based research project to you from the community partner as well as faculty and student researchers’ perspectives to help you learn some of the lessons we discovered through our university-community partnership.
