Community-Centered Research: An Interview with Expert, Meg Burke
by Kelsey Mackert
Communities often struggle to solve complex challenges in silos. A climate disaster hits, and a city’s emergency management team scrambles to respond alone. But what often gets lost in response efforts is the reminder that other communities have faced similar challenges and have learned what works, and what doesn’t.
A Community of Practice (CoP) creates spaces where practitioners can share knowledge, collaborate, and learn from each other’s successes and failures. CoPs offer a powerful alternative to traditional research by centering lived experiences. When you design research with communities instead of for them, both the research and the relationships become stronger.
What is a Community of Practice?
A CoP unites a group of people around a shared topic and common goals to create a space for conversation, connection, and collective learning.
For Meg Burke, Community of Practice Manager at Johns Hopkins University and RECIPES member, this means connecting local government practitioners. “My job is making sure we are connecting folks and giving them a space to have conversations,” she says, “to help people not recreate the wheel, learn from each other, and utilize resources created by other cities.”
What distinguishes CoPs is that they enable people to learn everything about others’ experiences: the good and the bad. “What didn’t work is almost as important as what did work,” Meg emphasized. CoPs create spaces to discuss what failed, why, and to learn from others’ mistakes.
What makes a Community of Practice different from Human-Centered Design?
You’ve probably heard of both COPs and Human-Centered Design (HCD). But, what’s the difference? HCD is an approach, a collaborative, creative process for understanding people’s needs and designing interventions that better serve them. A CoP is a structure, a way for people to come together around shared interests.
“They’re not the same thing,” Meg clarified. “HCD is an approach. CoP is just a way for people to come together to share ideas.” They’re most powerful together.
In the recent publication, Planning for food systems disruptions: lessons learned about resilience attributes from local governments’ emergency food response efforts, Meg’s team brought in HCD experts from MICA, another partner of the RECIPES network. The MICA team helped facilitate meetings between participating cities to co-create knowledge. The COP provided the convening structure and the HCD provided the methodology to genuinely hear and incorporate community input.
In late 2019, Meg’s team recruited 5 cities for the project on climate resilience and food systems. Then COVID-19 hit. “COVID was never supposed to be part of it,” Meg reflected. “It was always going to be food systems resilience, but COVID was added. COVID brought in a whole new set of challenges that people had never thought of before.
Because the cities had established connections with each other through a CoP, they shaped how the work evolved. This was a crucial time for cities to learn from each other as they managed emergency food response in a new environment.
“Communication and collaboration between cities was really critical,” Meg explained. Cities shared in real-time: How are you managing this? What’s working? What’s failing? “Pretty quickly into the project, we immediately made community resilience one of the research aims,” Meg added.
Trust: The Foundation of Community-Centered Research
For researchers, particularly from academic institutions, managing power dynamics and building trust with communities remains a challenge. “It’s difficult being from a university,” Meg acknowledged, “but it started with project design. The project has to be well thought out.” When centering communities in research, it’s important to think through: Who is the project benefiting? Is there reciprocity? Does this serve the community’s priorities?
“Bringing in cities and community members from the start so the project is truly something that is meaningful is crucial,” Meg emphasized. This upfront work allows the relationships to deepen and help navigate power dynamics. “Putting in that work from the start makes the project so much better long term,” says Meg.
RECIPES and community-based research
What’s unique about RECIPES is the convergence between different disciplines under the guise of wasted food. Meg’s experience in RECIPES transformed her practice. “I’m always learning. What I’ve learned from spending so much time with folks in other subject areas and expertise has been so valuable to my work.” Meg has taken RECIPES’ principles of co-creating knowledge and convergence to other work and experiences.
Meg added that having “exposure to additional research, other data sources, other approaches to doing things—it’s something you can’t get elsewhere unless you’re on a project like [RECIPES].”