COREN engages with its third sector partners
On Thursday 20th May 2021, ARC NWC’s Community Research and Engagement Network (COREN) partner organisations: Liverpool Community Voluntary Service, Blackburn with Darwen Healthy Living, and For Housing; provided ARC NWC staff with a whistle stop tour of the exciting and essential work they are doing to help improve population health across the north west coast, as well as discussing the role that research and data plays in the design and evaluation of their projects.
Following the presentations the attendees began to discuss how the ARC-NWC and the third sector can become better partners, and what ‘sharing knowledge and expertise’ productively might look like moving forward. Key take-aways were:
– Research projects may benefit from third sector organisations being included from the planning stages
– Projects delivered by the third sector may benefit from an engagement with research from the beginning.
– When ARC NWC include third sector organisations in research it needs to carefully consider legacy potential
– Avoid cliff-edges for when projects finish.
– There is an appetite in the third sector for upskilling/training in conducting and using research
– ARC NWC needs to explore ways to respond to this and help build capacity.
This session showed us that there is an enthusiasm and need for researchers and third sector organisations to be working much more closely together, but also much more to discuss in terms of how we make this happen! In the coming weeks there will be a follow-up COREN session to take these discussions further and to start sketching out plans for the next phase of this partnership working within ARC NWC.
More about the work of the COREN here
https://arc-nwc.nihr.ac.uk/get-involved/coren/
Professor Mark Gabbay, Director of ARC NWC, said “The COREN is doing great work in establishing the best ways of working with community based third sector organisations. Both inside and outside of the COREN the ARC NWC is proud to have members from the third sector working with us across our research portfolio.”
