Partnerships
The power of our partnership is seen in collaborative relationships that mutually add value, growth and development to our respective missions. Together, our work and the work of our partners help to influence and shape the world in which we want to live, lead and serve.
The Chicago Community, Media & Research Partnership started in September 2019, with a mission to explore how community media outlets can effectively share health research with communities and populations experiencing health disparities in order to improve their health decision-making.
Guided by a nine-member Task Force and collaboratively led by Public Narrative and the Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities (ARCC) at Northwestern University, the project was funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), a federal institute dedicated to connecting communities with evidence-based health research to support their health decision-making.
OUR FRAMEWORK
Over two years, our partnership built the capacity of a broad group of community and patient stakeholders, community media journalists, and health researchers to meaningfully connect and understand each other’s perspectives, assets, and needs. This informed the development of a framework showing how health research findings can best reach and serve under-served populations in Chicago, via community media. We’re excited to now share the results of our work together: a framework for making research accessible through community media. The framework (below) provides a set of key questions to guide research partnerships through the process of sharing relevant, actionable health information in impactful ways. This approach harnesses the powerful opportunity of more directly engaging diverse communities through media they trust and use.
This framework is just one step towards making health research more accessible. Across all three stakeholder groups we heard that there’s a need for structural change within research and media. Public Narrative and ARCC are exploring ways to further this work, and we’re sharing the suggestions we heard from the task force and listening session participants with universities and funders that have the power and resources to implement necessary changes.
Click here to see the full framework with questions, and click here to read a summary of all that went into it, including examples of necessary structural support suggested by stakeholders throughout the project. Click here to access our project poster.
OUR MEDIA GUIDES
We help guide the news ecosystem to produce news that matters.
Whether it’s training communities on the ground, gathering voices through our programs and events, or establishing strong partnerships to make greater impact, Public Narrative has worked through the decades to focus on what matters most–the people who shape our city through their voice and actions.