News and Events

I want to talk about what it means to do bottom-up, community-engaged work, and how our recent creation of the Partnership Development Award with the South Jersey Institute of Population Health (SJIPH) furthers that mission. I hope you’ll consider applying for that funding – and that these reflections help you understand why we are providing $5,000 awards to community organizations to start to build relationships with universities.   

I use the language of bottom-up, community-engaged research because I believe in community. I’ve always held these values – whether it be in the faith-filled communities I grew up in, Northwest Philadelphia where I was an AmeriCorps Vista and community organizer, or New Orleans where I worked with neighborhood associations after Hurricane Katrina. In those places, much like in South Jersey, top-down solutions have negative impacts. Too often they undermine trust, have unfunded mandates, or create as many problems as they solve.   

As a researcher, it’s hard to engage in bottom-up work. Our jobs depend on publishing academic work, and academic publishing too often stays in its silos instead of participating in solutions. Engagement and relationship-building take time and resources, two scarce commodities. At the most basic level, this is the key to CURE’s work. If we are going to be a partner in bottom-up solutions, we need to find ways to unlock resources that support that work.   

That’s why I’m so proud of the work we’re doing with the South Jersey Institute of Population Health (SJIPH). CURE has been supporting SJIPH’s evaluation of its initial 11 grants. On October 11th, we hosted an event to share those findings. There were some incredible projects – from the use of augmented reality to better understand the opioid crisis to a program to provide trauma-informed training to teachers. You can read about that work in our 2024 SJIPH Impact Report.

We also shared what we’d learned about our own grant-making process. The mission of SJIPH is to fund community-engaged research projects that address health disparities in South Jersey. But we had pockets of communities that we weren’t reaching – particularly in rural communities. We want to increase funding for those projects – but we’re also realistic. To do so, we have to support new partnerships in communities with fewer connections to Rutgers and Rowan. In other words, the relationships aren’t there yet, and that’s where the work starts.   

That’s how we came up with the idea for the Partnership Development Awards. The premise of these awards is simple: authentic, bottom-up work requires relationships, and relationship-building takes time and resources. These awards for $5,000 support just that. They acknowledge that if you work in a grassroots organization and some of your staff is part-time, it costs the organization to build these relationships. That while Zoom is great, sometimes you need to meet in person; so the awards can be used for lunch or travel costs. The $5,000 Partnership Development Award recognizes the resources required to do this work and provides support to build relationships with folks at Rowan and Rutgers so that our collective work can improve.  

We’ve put together a simple application process, with unintrusive reporting and technical support so that community organizations can meet faculty members from our institutions to explore this work together. If you’re a community organization, we hope you’ll apply. If you’re a professor and interested in this work, reach out to us here at CURE – we have an intake process to help match you with community organizations.   

Most importantly, thank you. This is our small way at SJIPH and CURE to acknowledge and support how important relationship building is to bottom-up, community-engaged research. We hope you join us on this journey.   

– Stephen Danley

A year ago, I was named director here at CURE. As we enter my second year on the job, I want to share my reflections on the past year, and where we’re going.  

The biggest thing I learned at CURE in year one was that our community partners are asking for movement work, not service work. Rutgers does a lot of great volunteering and service, but our partners have been asking us for work that contributes to something bigger. That means taking on research projects that contribute to a wider mission and movement.  

The through line in much our community-engaged research is that something bigger. Over this year, we’ll be sharing reflections from members of our research teams. But to start the year, I wanted to provide you with a snapshot of what community-engagement that is movement-focused looks like:  

 – Our research with One Camden is producing an educational equity analysis of Camden’s unique universal enrollment system. In April, we presented preliminary findings at the Urban Affairs Association Conference. We’re sharpening those findings, and setting up a meeting with stakeholders at the Camden School District so that our findings about the challenges of Spanish-speaking households in navigating Camden’s school choice eco-system can impact policy. 

 – We’ve worked with the South Jersey Institute for Population Health (SJIPH) and will be launching a partnership formation award this Fall that recognizes and funds the work that community organizations put into partnering with academics at Rutgers University-Camden and Rowan University. I’m really excited about this model!  

 – This October, we’ll be partnering with Mighty Writers to launch a youth participatory planning project to help build the drumbeat for a community-owned grocery store in Camden. That project, let by CURE Graduate Assistant Melissa Thompson, has already been highlighted by TapInto Camden.  

 – Our Who Owns Camden? project builds on the success of research by Rutgers in Newark. By working with the Camden Community Development Association, we’ve identified that multiple LLCs are being used to mask corporate purchases from larger corporations. We’ll be releasing more on that study soon.  

– Over the summer, we had 13 Community First Fellows placed in community organizations and trained in community-engaged pedagogies. We’ve had overwhelmingly positive feedback about how these placements helped organizations expand their capacity and continue their good work. Many have already asked when they can next receive a fellow.  

There are more projects than just those, and through the year you’ll be hearing about them. I’m extremely proud of this research. For each of these projects we sat down with community folks and talked about what research could mean for community work that was already happening. In doing so, we imagined projects that support local work while also producing academic knowledge.  

That’s why we say CURE is a place where community work and research go hand-in-hand.  

This Tuesday (September 10th, 4-6pm) we’ll be celebrating that work with our Fall Friends of CURE event. It’s the first of many chances to meet the community we’re building, get involved, and join the movement. I hope you’ll join us.  

– Stephen