Dr. Vicky Bungay is a professor and the associate director of research at the UBC School of Nursing. She is also the director of UBC’s Capacity Research Unit and holds a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Gender, Equity and Community Engagement. Dr. Bungay's work addresses inequities that negatively affect people’s health and well-being, including the devastating effects of stigma, discrimination, and violence. As a nurse, she spent most of her career working in a variety of health and research contexts with a focus on gender-based violence and equity-oriented care. With research often having minimal effects or being designed or implemented without including women affected by violence, she sees a gap that needs to be addressed to mitigate the effects of violence, and increase opportunities to create positive and inclusive spaces of care that seek to work with and for women affected by violence. With this in mind, she works in close partnership with communities that are regularly excluded in health and social policy and programming in order to allow for a deeper understanding of what really happens on the ground. One of these partnerships is Scaling Up, a seven-year research project that studies the implementation, testing and refinement of a community-led, strengths-based, and trauma and violence-informed outreach intervention in order to support self-identifying women who have experienced interpersonal and structural gender-based violence.
Collaboration is the hallmark of Scaling Up, says Dr. Bungay, explaining that while traditional research can certainly be effective, it creates a hierarchical relationship (or partial partnership) in which the researcher dictates the roles of their advisory committees. Dr. Bungay’s focus on knowledge exchange is a key component of her teams’ collaborative practices: she works in partnership to ensure that research and community organizations and members are integrated at the ground level and into the core of her program of research. Through collaboration, the Scaling Up advisory committee — which includes community leaders, researchers, staff, and women with lived and living experiences of gender-based violence — provides leadership and guidance across all aspects of the research project.
For underrepresented communities experiencing marginalization, engaging with research and researchers has frequently been unsafe. As such, Dr. Bungay stresses the importance of trust in building partnerships and explains that:
“Trust is about meeting people where they are at and recognizing that the women [we] work with are experts in their own right and that we build from that expertise, not take over."
In the traditionally one-sided relationship between universities and community partners, researchers are often the sole beneficiaries, but the cultivation of trust creates safe, respectful and reciprocal relationships. Within their intervention, the scaling up team has used the results of their pilot study STRENGTH to determine core indicators of trust within care providers' interactions with women.
Dr. Bungay aims to create outreach models that foster women’s rights and capacities to identify their priorities in navigating health services. Her partnerships have allowed her to develop innovative research that responds to community-identified needs. Through central tenets of critical theories, Scaling Up is community-embedded and community-led with every community site tailored to the community's needs.
Kx Takeaways:
-
“Trust is really about showing your commitments and showing your authenticity. Trust comes through relationships and over time. It's about being able to engage, admit you're wrong, have humility, and be willing to learn.”
-
Knowledge exchange (Kx) provides a structure that facilitates successful academic-community partnerships that acknowledge all partners as knowledge holders and creators providing a more holistic and integrated approach to research.
-
Robust research with community partners should be grounded in existing evidence and relationships.