Melbourne Social Equity Institute is a leader in community-engaged and coproductive research. These ways of working inform all our research priorities. We also advance the use of community-engaged and coproductive methodologies through knowledge sharing and researcher training and development.
The core feature of community-engaged and coproductive research is a high level of community decision‑making and partner involvement in the purpose, design, conduct and use of research. These approaches recognise the significant expertise of people affected by social inequities and engage with them as active agents in designing research for positive social change. They also recognise the value of engaging across sectors to access diverse knowledge and research settings, and support the strong take‑up of new research evidence.
Featured Activities
Community Fellows Program
A signature program fostering community-engaged and coproductive research, the Community Fellows Program recognises that community organisations are often best placed to undertake the research most relevant to their organisation and the communities they serve. It was developed in recognition that community organisations possess deep and extensive practice knowledge, but often lack the capacity, time and resources to test, codify and share this knowledge.
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Research Repository
The Community Engaged and Coproductive Research Repository brings together a curated selection of scholarly works on community-engaged and coproductive research methodologies for social equity. It contains citations from research predominantly undertaken from 2000 onwards in high-, middle-, and low-income country settings. Significant and highly influential articles pre-dating the year 2000 have also been included. <.
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Community Engaged Research Network
The Community Engaged Research Network provides opportunities for University of Melbourne researchers from all career stages and disciplines to come together to share knowledge about community engaged and coproductive approaches to research..
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Community Engagement Grants
The Community Engagement Grants program supports University of Melbourne researchers to develop interdisciplinary and community-engaged networks and is designed to build a researcher’s
ability to engage with community
issues at a grassroots level. Funding of up to $3000
enables researchers to develop
interdisciplinary and community engaged networks within and external to the University.
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Ethical and Equitable Digital Design Matrix for Community Engaged Research
The Ethical and Equitable Digital Design Matrix was developed to support the ethical and equitable design elements of digital technologies used in community-engaged research. The matrix correlates the stages of the project with the elements of ethical design. This produces a series of questions relevant to design, operation and governance of the digital tool at each stage of the project.
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Community Engaged and Coproductive Research Symposium
This all day event held in November 2024 featured panel discussions of a range of topics related to community-engaged and coproductive research including decolonising research practice, trauma-informed research and dealing with disclosures and vicarious trauma, and lived experience researcher experiences and wellbeing.
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