Beyond Incentives for Involvement to Compensation for Consultants: Increasing Equity in CBPR Approaches

Background: Community-based participatory research (CBPR) strives for equitable collaboration among community and academic partners throughout the research process. To build the capacity of academia to function as effective research partners with communities, the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute (NC TraCS), home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH)'s Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA), developed a community engagement consulting model. This new model harnesses the expertise of community partners with CBPR experience and compensates them equitably to provide technical assistance to community- academic research partnerships. Objectives: This paper describes approaches to valuing com- munity expertise, the importance of equitable compensation for community partners, the impact on the community partners, opportunities for institutional change, and the constraints faced in model implementation. Methods: Community Experts (CEs) are independent con- tractor consultants. CEs were interviewed to evaluate their satisfaction with their engagement and compensation for their work.