Toward decolonized fiscal relationships between universities and community organizations: lessons learned from the California community engagement alliance against COVID-19

ABSTRACT

In September 2020, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $12 million to support engagement with historically marginalized communities hardest hit by COVID-19. The award was designed to mobilize community-engagement in pandemic response, and to support partnerships as part of the NIH Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities. All aspects of the award were fast-tracked, and NIH utilized a ‘more flexible’ funding mechanism (OTA) to facilitate swift distribution of funds. In this paper, we draw upon an analysis of findings from a 2021 survey conducted with 11 California CEAL sites representing urban and rural settings, private and public universities, and established and new community partners and qualitative analysis of 2020–2022 site-wide meeting minutes. We describe the challenges posed at the federal (e.g. NIH funding), university, and community–university partnership levels as well as opportunities and creative workarounds. Challenges include delays in subcontracts and payments to community partners that undermined trust and reproduced unequal and hierarchical power relationships. We build upon our findings and collective experience to propose a framework for decolonized fiscal relationships between universities and community partners which contains key recommendations for funders, universities, and community partners.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based participatory research
• community engaged research
• COVID-19
• fiscal relationships
• equity

Acknowledgements

The authors thank everyone involved in the California CEAL initiative, and the fund managers and administrators in university and community sites that supported this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The participants of this study did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so research supporting data is not available.

2. One RCMI is part of a CTSA.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the Community Engagement Alliance Against COVID-19 Disparities [grant 21-312-0217571-66106L].