Working Together: a Toolkit for Fostering Academic-Community Partnerships

This toolkit is designed to guide and inspire academics and community organisations to forge equitable, productive and mutually rewarding partnerships. It distils key messages and good practice that are grounded in our own experience in various social work and public health research and knowledge exchange projects. In a series of principles and prompts, we aim to guide the planning, implementation and sustainability of joint working to understand societal problems and effect positive change. This is not an exhaustive guide, and we recognise that a host of factors and issues specific to certain types of collaborations, academic disciplines and partners have likely not been addressed. Instead, the toolkit is intended to serve as a scaffolding of such endeavours by centering the principles of trust, equality and mutuality.