The Crabby Creek Initiative: Building and Sustaining an Interdisciplinary Community Partnership
In this article, we identify the steps and strategies that emerged through an interdisciplinary, community-based participatory research (CBPR) project—the Crabby Creek Initiative. The Initiative was undertaken jointly by Cabrini College faculty in biology and psychology, the Valley Creek Restoration Partnership (VCRP), the Stroud Water Research Center, (SWRC) and local residents of this eastern Pennsylvania region. The paper examines the phases the partners have gone through and the strategies used as the building blocks of partnerships in the process of collaboration: trust, mutual design, shared implementation, joint ownership, and dissemination of knowledge, the building blocks of sustainable partnerships. Ultimately, the lessons learned have the potential to galvanize practitioners to engage not only in citizen science, but also more broadly in the practice of applied and engaged democracy.
Read the article here or download the entire issue here
Author(s):
Melissa Terlecki
David Dunbar
Caroline Nielsen
Cynthia McGauley
Lisa Ratmansky
Nancy L. Watterson
Jon Hannum
Kallyn Seidler
Emily Bongiorno
Owen Owens
Pete Goodman
Chuck Marshall
Susan Gill
Kristen Travers
John Jackson
Publication Date:
2010
Thank you to the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) for kindly allowing URBAN to share this resource. JCES is published twice a year at The University of Alabama. It is a peer-reviewed international research journal through which faculty, staff, students, and community partners disseminate scholarly works. JCES integrates teaching, research, and community engagement in all disciplines, addressing critical problems identified through a community-participatory process.