# Design and implementation of a Community Expert Group comprised of people with lived expertise of homelessness at an academic health research center: a program description and analysis of challenges

## TL;DR

This paper describes creating a community expert group of homeless individuals in a health research center and highlights challenges in institutional support.

## Contribution

A novel approach to integrating lived expertise of homelessness into academic health research and identifying institutional barriers.

## Key findings

- Community expert groups can be designed to include people with lived experience of homelessness in academic research.
- Institutional policies often lack support for long-term collaboration with community experts.
- Individual research teams frequently fill gaps in defining roles and scope for community experts.

## Abstract

The involvement of communities with a stake in healthcare research is often limited, and attempts to increase their participation and to create shared decision-making partnerships are often hindered by structural barriers. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a Community Expert Group comprised of people with lived expertise of homelessness at an academic health research center. We detail the group’s model, guiding principles, governance structure, and activities, and discuss institutional challenges encountered over the course of this partnership. We report that the lack of policies and practices in academic research institutions to support long-term collaboration with community experts makes it challenging to define their scope and role, often requiring individual research teams to fill this gap.

Academic researchers have largely carried out their work in a top-down approach, with community's role often being relegated to being assigned as research participants or through minimal public consultation. For decades, communities with lived experience have called for their perspectives to be incorporated into research on issues affecting them. While there are several widely accepted approaches to address the harmful trajectory of leaving out community voices, less know about the practical implementation and challenges within large academic research institutions. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a Community Expert Group comprised of people with lived expertise of homelessness at an academic health research center. We detail the group’s model, guiding principles, governance structure, and activities, and then discuss institutional challenges we encountered over the course of this partnership. We report that the lack of policies and practices in academic research institutions to support long-term collaboration with community experts make it challenging to define their scope and role, often requiring individual research teams to fill this gap.