Â鶹¾«Ñ¡

We set up a project to support researchers at the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡ to engage with communities. We know we want to involve lots of diverse communities in our research, so we wanted to provide some resources to help researchers at every step of their journey.

We wanted to develop the project firstly because we recognised there was a need from researchers. Researchers quite often were really willing to work with communities in developing their research ideas but they didn't know how to go about it, sometimes they were anxious, sometimes they knew there were resources but they didn't know where to look.

But secondly, we had a real demand from our community partners. So we want to do it really to support researchers and communities to work better together. It was really exciting to work with community partners as part of our project, they're so invested in working with the university and they recognised there were going to be so many benefits out of the project. They were so enthusiastic; they came to all the meetings with such fantastic ideas and it was a real privilege actually to work with them and learn from them through this process.

So we're really excited that through this project we've been able to develop a road map. This road map is going to support researchers at every single point, and where they need to think about working with communities and how they can be inclusive, we've got points where we can signpost them to further resources or support or information that's going to help them.

But most importantly it's really important for us in sharing that power with communities. Communities will know about the road map too so they'll know what to expect when working with researchers at the University Â鶹¾«Ñ¡.

So now we've developed the road map the hard work really starts, we want to get the road map used by researchers, we want every single researcher at the University that's working with communities to know about it and to be able to use it.

And we also want to publish some academic journals based on the work we've done because we think we want to share with other higher education institutions. And we also want to share it with funders to show them how committed we are to really making these relationships work.