Community Engaged Scholars Program

Established in 2009, the mission of the Community-Engaged Scholars Program (CES-P) is to increase the capacity of community-academic partnerships to conduct research with mutual ownership of the processes and products, and ultimately, improve the health of our communities in South Carolina and beyond.

The program objectives are to:

• Incentivize and foster community and academic partnerships;
• Encourage collaborative identification of community health priorities; and
• Develop and provide an in-person/online interactive group learning curriculum.

The program consists of didactic and hands-on training sessions that academic and community partners attend together.

Participants design and complete a Community-Based Participatory Research project and are awarded pilot funds (up to $10,000) from the South Carolina Clinical and Translational Research (SCTR) Institute to collect pilot data for future funding applications.

The Community Engaged Scholars Program uses the Are We Ready? Toolkit: A Toolkit for Academic-Community Partnerships in preparation for Community-Based Participatory Research to guide the establishment of strong community-academic partnerships.

Register for your free copy using the Are We Ready? Toolkit Registration Form.

Past CES teams (PDF) have:

• Presented at state and national conferences, with both academic and community partners.
• Been awarded funding to continue their research with community partners as co-investigators.
• Published articles about their partnership teams and pilot work.
• Established lasting partnerships within their communities.