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Buckinghamshire New University (BNU) is committed to empowering members of the community to generate knowledge with transformative potential in their local area through community research.

Community research is about identifying and speaking to key stakeholders in the community to find out what they need, what is important to them, what is impacting on them, and to create solutions to problems and make their lives better.

BNU can help in several ways, including:

• Bringing together community organisations, groups, or local people with experienced BNU academics so that they might be able to help co-design, co-produce, or just offer advice and guidance.
• Helping community-based researchers to go it alone by giving access to a free community-based participatory research (CBPR) toolkit.
• Hosting community research events and forums, providing networking opportunities and a space to discuss all things community research.
• Advice about research ethics.

Working with BNU on community research projects

Do you have a community research project in mind, but are unsure where to start? Would you benefit from some help and advice from research active academics? Are you seeking an academic partner to conduct some community research with you or on your behalf?

We cannot guarantee we have an academic to lead every project, but we can almost certainly help in some way.

If you would like to discuss a community research project, please contact Dr Ben Clayton or Dr Rebecca Rochon.

'Healthwatch Bucks’ community-based participatory research toolkit

This was produced with Healthwatch Bucks, in conjunction with BNU and community-based researchers with funding from the . Rather than simply creating documents based on what we thought were needed, the design process for this toolkit adopted a CBPR ethos of repeated consultation and coproduction with members of the community.

The toolkit includes a workbook to help community researchers reflect on their ideas and plan their community-based research projects, as well as more detailed information guides with links to further resources.

Community research events and forums

BNU offers a free community research ethics forum for community researchers. Email your ethical queries to Dr Ben Clayton and they will be circulated, confidentially, to members of the BNU Research Ethics Panel. You can usually expect a response within five working days.

Please be aware that any advice and guidance provided via our research ethics forum does not constitute any form of ethics approval. The decision about what to do with the advice is entirely yours and BNU and the BNU Research Ethics Panel are not accountable for actions you take to resolve any ethical issues.