How do we know if a community-academic partnership is truly working?

Strong partnerships are built on trust, shared leadership, mutual benefit, and meaningful engagement, but these qualities can be difficult to measure. As funders, institutions, and communities increasingly seek evidence of partnership effectiveness, researchers and community leaders face an important challenge: how do we measure engagement without oversimplifying the complex relationships that drive successful collaboration?

Join John Oetzel and Ella Greene-Moton, longtime leaders in community-engaged research and members of the Engage for Equity team, for a conversation about measuring what matters in community-academic partnerships. Drawing on their experiences developing and implementing tools such as PHIRE (Partnership and Health Improvement Research Evaluation), they will discuss practical approaches to assessing partnership quality, understanding community influence, and using evaluation findings to strengthen collaboration and impact.

Together, they will explore how meaningful measurement can support stronger partnerships while remaining grounded in community priorities, lived experience, and shared decision-making.

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What to Expect

✅ Practical tools for measuring partnership engagement

✅ Strategies for identifying what is working and where partnerships can improve

✅ Key principles for measuring what matters in community-academic partnerships

Featured Speakers

John Oetzel, PhD

John Oetzel is a professor at the University of Waikato in New Zealand whose work focuses on helping communities and academics work together to address health and social challenges. His research examines community-engaged research partnerships, implementation science, and health outcomes, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous and community-led approaches. He is a longstanding member of the Engage for Equity research team.

Ella Greene-Moton

Ella Greene-Moton is a nationally recognized community-engaged research leader with more than 40 years of experience in public health advocacy, policy, and community-based participatory research. Her work focuses on building and sustaining community-academic partnerships, elevating community voice in research and decision-making, and developing evaluation approaches that reflect community priorities. She serves as a community leader, educator, and consultant supporting partnership-centered research initiatives across the country.

Who Should Attend?

• Community leaders and community-based organizations
• Academic researchers and faculty
• Students and trainees
• Public health and healthcare professionals
• Program evaluators
• Anyone interested in strengthening community-academic partnerships and measuring their impact

This seminar is part of the REACH WIDE (Webinars and Insightful Discussions on Engagement) series and the 2026-2027 theme, Sharing Community Power and Creating Impact.

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