Keep Talking was a UKRI Enhancing Partnerships for Place-Based Engagement funded project, led by the University of Staffordshire and Expert Citizens CIC between December 2019 and August 2020.
The aims of Keep Talking were to understand how universities and community partners can develop sustainable structures for people to engage in long term, place-based research, with a specific focus on working with community researchers. University of Staffordshire partnered with Expert Citizens CIC, an organisation that supports people with lived experience of homelessness, substance misuse, domestic violence and poverty. While both organisations had experience of working with people with lived experience as community researchers, we were keen to explore issues of sustained support for community researchers, capacity building and increasing our impact and reach through partnership working. We outlined the following research questions:
• What do community researchers need to sustain involvement?
• Where should community research teams ‘sit’ to best meet needs of communities?
• What support can universities offer community organisations to engage publics with meaningful, locally relevant research?
Keep Talking built on a previous participatory research project, Get Talking Hardship, led by the University of Staffordshire and commissioned by Voices and Stoke-on-Trent’s Hardship Commission. Keep Talking enabled the Hardship Commission to build on Get Talking Hardship through continued engagement with the community research team.
Following the first national lockdown due to Covid-19 in March 2020, we continued to deliver Keep Talking remotely. This gave us an opportunity to strengthen our partnership with community researchers and develop a deep understanding of how universities can best meet the wellbeing needs of community researchers.