









































ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1


 Vol. 1, Issue 1 

ENGAGE! 2019 Vol. 1 No. 1 https://doi.org/10.18060/22815 

Copyright © 2019 Author(s). 

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

TRUST IN PARTICIPATORY ACTION COMMUNITY-ENGAGED PARTNERSHIPS: 
RELATIONSHIPS AND HISTORIC TRAUMA MATTER 
BARBARA PIERCE, JOAN CARLSON, WANDA THRUSTON, PAIGE KLEMME, ANDREW FULTZ, 
NICOLE OGLESBY, MARY STUDLEY, AND VAL TATE

ABSTRACT 
University-community participatory action 

partnerships can be mutually beneficial. Universities 

often work alongside communities to establish new 

and innovative community-based programming and 

research that are intended to benefit communities 

from these efforts. However, mistrust has been found 

to be a major issue in creating and maintaining strong 

relationships. This paper will marry a model of trust 

that forms when partners exhibit relational capital, 

relational embeddedness, and transparency within the 

principles of trauma-informed care as established by 

the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services 

Administration (SAMHSA) (2014).  

A group of university researchers and 

community activists/organizers analyzed their work on 

a project to bring a community-engaged participatory 

action design team intervention to develop and 

implement trauma-responsive care in an established 

transitional African American community located in a 

large urban Midwestern city. Through our analysis we 

identified three major reasons for mistrust: 

objectification of community members; lack of real 

change in the community; and lack of transparency. 

Additionally, we found that paying attention to power 

differentials between the university researchers and 

community partners is key. Major findings around best 

practices mirrored the SAMHSA trauma-informed care 

principles and included developing “not just trust but 

trusting relationships,” sharing “voice and choice” with 

all who seek to participate, understanding the 

historical trauma within the community, using cultural 

guides and long-time seasoned community organizers 

to facilitate processes, “showing up” and being 

interested in the community beyond the research or 

intervention by finding a way to give back to the 

community beyond the project.  

KEYWORDS: Community-engaged participatory-

action research; Trust; Trauma 

TRUST IN PARTICIPATORY ACTIONS 

COMMUNITY-ENGAGED PARTNERSHIPS: 

RELATIONSHIPS AND HISTORIC TRAUMA 

MATTER  

Establishing trust in partnerships is a hallmark 

of good practice for university researchers who work in 

the field of community-engaged participatory action 

(CEPA) intervention research (Khodyakov, Mikesell, 

Schraiber, Booth, & Bromley, 2016; Israel, Schultz, 

Parker, & Becker, 2001). Medical and research mistrust 

is common in the United States, especially in 

communities of color. Two well-known incidents of 

past research that led to mistrust are the Tuskegee 

Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male (Katz, 

Kegeles, Kressin, Green, Wang, James, Russell, & 

Claudio, 2006) and cervical cancer cell research study 

which appropriated the cell-line of Henrietta Lacks 

(Skloot, 2010) without her permission or 

https://doi.org/10.18060/22815
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1        Pierce/Trust in Participatory Action 

 

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compensation. In the community in which our 

research team is working, a community grandmother 

described this mistrust as, “You people keep coming 

into our community and promising to help us but all 

you ever do is collect your data and leave. We don’t 

even know what your data says.” It is not surprising 

that African American communities are especially 

wary. Yet, in a study that identified people’s 

willingness to participate in research, Katz et al., 2006, 

surveyed 1,133 adult Black, Hispanic, and Non-Hispanic 

White individuals and identified Blacks were 1.8 times 

more likely than Whites to express fear of participating 

in research. However, there was no statistically 

significant difference in actual willingness to 

participate in biomedical research. In addition to the 

past unethical medical research practices, fear and 

mistrust stems from not acknowledging systematic 

oppression that has resulted in historical trauma and 

ongoing trauma experienced in predominately low-

income communities of color. Current community-

engaged researchers must work to undo this fear and 

mistrust. Using participatory action processes may 

help to some degree however, establishing and 

maintaining trust remains a key issue.  

 To help researchers develop, implement, and 

evaluate CEPA interventions, this paper will marry a 

theory of partnership trust (Pierce, McGuire & Howes, 

2015) with principles of trauma-informed practice 

(SAMHSA, 2014) to identify best practices in CEPA 

research using the example of one community project 

which the author team is working. To be clear, our 

definition of CEPA is working in deep partnership with 

community stakeholders to identify issues and 

interventions as defined by the stakeholders to 

ameliorate a community issue. For this work to occur 

university and community stakeholders must establish 

and maintain trusting partnerships.  

 Trust, as defined here, is the mutual and 

complementary respect that partners have so that each 

can perform their work with integrity (Mayer, Davis, & 

Shooreman, 1995). Becerra, Lunnan & Huemer (2008) 

studied trust in partnerships and identified strong 

partnerships as having the ability to share explicit and 

tacit or implicit information. This sharing happens 

when people feel comfortable enough to form 

relationships by working together on shared processes 

(Polanyi, 1967) in a transparent manner. It is when 

community partners share their “insider knowledge 

and experience” within a community that the day-to-

day work of participatory action community-engaged 

projects occurs and forms trust. However, trust is 

easily eroded and the three components of trust -- 

relational capital (relationships), relational 

embeddedness (working together on processes), and 

transparency -- must be ever present (Pierce, et al., 

2015; Hall, Imburgia, Jaggers, Pierce, Bloomquist, 

Richardson, Danh, & Hensel, 2017). In university-

community partnerships, absence of trust erodes the 

work together and leads to the decay of the 

partnership (Becerra, et al. 2008). A case study 

completed by Pierce, et al. (2015) identified the rise, fall 

and rise again of a large university-agency partnership 

over the course of a number of years possibly due to 

issues of lack of trusting relationships, and especially 

transparency and working together daily to accomplish 

recognized goals. Further, Hall, et al. (2017) has 

identified similar results in establishing and 

maintaining trusting research relationship 



ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1        Pierce/Trust in Participatory Action 

 

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partnerships within a university-agency research 

relationship.  

 In communities that experience high 

oppression and historical mistrust of university 

researchers, partnerships may be able to facilitate 

mutually beneficial research to improve conditions for 

the community. Yet, historical trauma is ever present 

in many communities in which researchers work and 

must be acknowledged and addressed. Historical 

trauma occurs when groups of people have 

experienced “subjugation” by the dominant societal 

group (Sotero, 2009, p. 99). Sotero’s (2009) model of 

historical trauma suggests that four elements are 

present in these groups: overwhelming violence, 

segregation or displacement, economic deprivation, 

and cultural dispossession. Given the history of slavery 

in the African American population with its violence, 

segregation, deprivation and cultural dispossession, 

this population group certainly has experienced 

historical trauma. In addition, given the alarming 

treatment of this population by researchers, it is not 

surprising that participation with researchers is fraught 

with difficulty and leads to the need for trusting and 

trauma-responsive research practices in order to 

partner authentically with communities to improve the 

health or well-being of their community.  

 Trust and attending to historical trauma are 

two trauma-informed principles that have been 

endorsed by the Substance Abuse Mental Health 

Services Administration (SAMHSA) (2014) who have 

been integrally involved in educating the public about 

trauma in general (Harris and Fallot, 2001). These 

principles based upon the work of Harris & Fallot 

(2001) and Elliot, Bjelajac, Fallot, Markoff, & Reed, 

(2005) include: safety; trustworthiness and 

transparency; peer support; collaboration and 

mutuality; empowerment-voice and choice; and 

attention to cultural, historical, and gender issues. 

Further, these principles identified and tested in many 

different community settings appear to be 

generalizable and, we argue, inform development of 

trusting and trauma-responsive CEPA partnerships.  

 

METHOD 
 This study examines participatory research 

practices of our community-engaged partnership with 

a historical African American community and analyzes 

responses to questions around concerns and best 

practices regarding the university and community 

relationship needed for this project. Thematic analysis 

was conducted on answers to the two questions posed 

to the team by the team leaders. The research team, all 

authors of this paper, essentially formed a virtual focus 

group to discuss concerns and best practices for CEPA 

on this project to bring trauma-responsive 

interventions to the identified community. The 

research team was asked to respond to the following 

questions:  

 What are the major areas of concern for people in the 

community regarding working with university 

researchers? 

 What are the main best practices that university 

researchers can do to enhance partnership with the 

community?  

Thematic analysis included line-by-line and axial 

coding on the quotations in the transcribed data. 

Further analysis used the constant comparison 



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approach within and across data points (Braun & 

Clark, 2006).  

 This project is bounded by the work of this 

research team between 2016 and present and centers 

on the initiation of a project to bring trauma 

responsive services to one African American 

community. The case method overarches this paper 

(Stake, 2005) while content thematic analysis was used 

to explain results of concerns and best practices.  

Case Setting 

 The work of this research team had its origins 

in a health fair planning group as three of the 

university researchers participated in the development 

of a health fair for the community during the summer 

of 2016. In developing the health fair with various 

community partners including residents of the 

community, it became clear that members of the 

community were frightened by the overwhelming 

violence and poverty in their community as well as the 

lack of ability to cope with the trauma that they, and 

especially the children in the community, were 

experiencing. Further exploration of this concern 

indeed led to a member of the community asking for 

trauma-responsive expertise. Researchers then 

identified a broader team of community engagement 

specialists who work daily within the community to 

develop a Learning Collaborative Project in order to 

bring trauma-responsive services to agencies working 

with children and families in the community. The 

research team convened a major stakeholder meeting 

to listen to community needs. Themes based on these 

needs were identified and reported back to the 

community. The research team extended project 

participation applications to community agencies who 

wished to work with the Learning Collaborative. Few 

community agencies actually applied and only a few 

people from those agencies began participating. Out of 

this, however, came an enlightening small group 

community discussion around historical trauma in 

their community that identified ways to bridge gaps 

between researchers and the community. As a result of 

this discussion, the research team expanded their team 

to include more community members and began to 

pay close attention to political forces both personal 

and community-wide which serve to confound work in 

the community or erode relational capital. The 

research team continued open communication 

(transparency) and work within the community on 

other projects (relational embeddedness), used 

cultural guides and community engagement staff more 

diligently, and paid attention to partnering using these 

new trust forming changes. Researchers recruited four 

community agency teams with which to work. Those 

community–based teams became energized and ready 

to work on the Learning Collaborative and continue 

this work today to bring trauma-responsive practices 

to schools and community.   

 

RESULTS 
Demographics 

 The focus group members include 7 

participants; 6 are female, 4 are Caucasian and 3 are 

African American. There are 2 doctoral students, 4 

community organizers, and one researcher. The other 

researcher on the team conducted the data collection 

and analysis and therefore did not participate in the 

focus group.  



ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1        Pierce/Trust in Participatory Action 

 

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 All quotations in this results section are 

directly reported from the data and represent the 

answers to the two focus group questions. We endorse 

the practice of grounding results in direct quotations 

from participants.  

 

Table 1. Themes of Concerns and Best Practices 

 

 

Question 1 -- Major areas of concern: Trust 

Overwhelmingly, the team expressed that the major 

area of concern for people in the community is lack of 

trust. This is expressed in three areas of mistrust: 

objectification, lack of positive community change, and 

lack of transparency in reporting data.  

Five of 7 focus group participants identified 

that lack of trust due to objectification by university 

researchers is a major concern for them mainly 

because community members report feeling like 

objects to be used for a purpose. One participant 

noted, “Historically, many researchers have taken from 

the community for their own benefit and not 

necessarily for the benefit of the community. Often 

times community members are weary of being ‘used’ 

for data purposes only for a journal article.” Another 

noted “the greatest concern for individuals in a 

community is being made an object of study versus 

being seen as a dynamic and evolving member of a 

community.” The understanding that researchers have 

an agenda of their own rather than helping to create an 

agenda which comes from within the community leads 

to the sense of being objectified, as well. 

“Unintentional objectification by researchers led to a 

community with understandable trust issues,” 

remarked one research team participant. Clearly 

another team member noted, “The community, first 

and foremost, wants to be recognized as an active, 

equal partner in all endeavors with university 

researchers.” “The ‘know it all’ attitude that university 

researchers have” creates deficit reactions and leads to 

objectification, as well.  

Concerns: 
Trust 

Objectification

Lack of positive 
community 

change

Transparency

Best 
practices

Safety/safe space

Attend to 
historical trauma

Collaboration/Voi
ce/Choice

Trusting 
relationships

Trustworthiness/
Transparency

Attand to power

One participant noted, “Historically, many 
researchers have taken from the 

community for their own benefit and not 
necessarily for the benefit of the 

community. Often times community 
members are weary of being ‘used’ for data 

purposes only for a journal article.” 
Another noted “the greatest concern for 

individuals in a community is being made 
an object of study versus being seen as a 

dynamic and evolving member of a 
community.” 

 



ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1        Pierce/Trust in Participatory Action 

 

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Erosion of trust also evolves from not 

producing positive change within the community. 

“Often the findings do not serve the community in a 

way of producing real change,” noted one participant. 

Another, strongly stated, “I have heard community 

members express concerns that once the researchers 

left, the funding and programs also left, so then the 

community ends up back where they started, but the 

researchers have their data.” This selfish attitude then 

does not leave sustainable change. “Once the 

university completes involvement they leave behind a 

gap in services.” “They generate a great deal of 

conversation but no real solutions get implemented … 

a bunch of talk and no action.”  

 Participants also discussed the community 

attitude toward not receiving reports back on data 

collected within the community which leads to trust 

issues due to lack of transparency. “Some community 

members have voiced their opinions in the past and 

their suggestions have been ignored” which leads to 

gaps in transparency and not hearing all of the voices 

in the community that erodes their trust further.  

Question 2 -- Best practices to enhance CEPA 

 The themes related to best practices emerged 

as creating safety/safe space; attention to historical 

trauma; collaboration/empowerment/voice and choice; 

create and maintain trusting relationships; being 

trustworthy and transparent; and attending to power 

differentials.  

 The research team members reported the 

creation of safety or safe space was a foundational 

skill of CEPA work and offered various ways in which 

to do this. Creation of this space involves ideas such as 

“having a meal together;” “providing transportation;” 

“hiring community members or researchers who look 

like the community;” “paying attention to power 

dynamics;” avoiding the “savior complex;” and 

“engaging in cultural humility.” 

 Attending to historical trauma is also a major 

theme in this project in particular. Research team 

members indicated that “learning the history of the 

community” and “practicing cultural humility” is 

important. One research team member said, “We must 

see the community as people, not as a project, not as a 

program.” Inherent in this statement is the sense that 

the community has experienced trauma as a result of 

being “just a project.” Another mentioned “community 

members are taking a risk by inviting outsiders into 

their community when past partnerships have the 

community members feeling like they were exploited.”  

 Being a good collaborator and promoting 

empowerment through voice and choice within the 

CEPA project is vital to its success. “Find out what the 

community wants and give it to them,” and another 

stated that community members have “a plethora of 

wisdom, knowledge and skills, that help us see their 

priorities and vision.” “We need to embrace their 

expertise.” “The community is the expert!” Another 

clearly stated, “Ignoring voices decreases trust and 

increases disengagement.” Collaboration also involved 

hiring for the project “from within the community.” 

Further, inclusion of team members from the 

community endorsed power sharing with the 

community team members to provide trainings and 

opportunities to “lead from within.” 

 Creating and maintaining trusting 

relationships is another theme crucial to best 

practice. The team, building trusting relationships over 



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time, “becomes involved in the community by 

attending things that are not necessarily tied to the 

research.”  

“Building authentic relationships with 
the community consists of spending time 
with and in the community. Attending 
events, forums, and gatherings as an 
informal participant sans title. I know 
from experience that I put in a lot of 
evenings and weekends in one particular 
community as a part of the relationship 
building stage.” 

 

Trusting relationships are built through 

sharing power and voice and through a “dialogic 

engagement that all voices are respected and heard.” 

Relationship is best expressed, says one team member, 

by “training and empowering them … investing in the 

relationships from an authentic standpoint” so the 

findings of the research are “owned by the community 

and the researchers alike.”  

 The last theme involves being trustworthy 

and transparent. While the data endorses ideas such 

as using non-jargon and transparent language it is also 

important to note the inherent power differential that 

is important to name and claim as a result of the work. 

Being trustworthy typically means that researchers 

should say what they are going to do and follow 

through by doing it. However, also found in the data 

was the idea that researchers should be particularly 

careful not to take advantage of the community 

participants. Trustworthy in the data here means that 

as researchers we “do not leave the community” and 

that we provide “sustainable interventions that do not 

disappear when the researchers leave the project.” It is 

so important that “the interventions that are developed 

need to be practical and do not leave the community 

without the possibility of sustainable services.” In 

addition, the research team endorsed that “change 

needs to be real” for the community.  

 Encompassing all aspects of these data is the 

theme of power. Researchers and community 

organizers all noted that a major difference between 

the university participants and the community 

participants is power. “Researchers who adopt a stance 

of conducting research ‘on’ a community perpetuate an 

imperialistic form of research that seeks to ‘fix’ and 

‘help.’ Instead, researchers should adopt a stance of 

conducting research ‘with’ a community … the goals 

and purposes have to be decided ideally by the 

community in conjunction with the researchers.” 

Other aspects of power include timing of meetings, 

who is in the room, sharing of processes and data, and 

“meeting members of the community where they are in 

the community in small groups on their turf … 

demonstrates that they are the priority.”  

DISCUSSION 
 Identification of trust as the major theme that 

emerged from the research team is not surprising. The 

literature makes clear that trust building in university-

community partnerships appears to be paramount. In 

the instance of this case study however, the 

identification of various aspects of trust is novel 

Trustworthy in the data here means 
that as researchers we “do not leave 

the community” and that we provide 
“sustainable interventions that do 

not disappear when the researchers 
leave the project.” 



ENGAGE! / Vol. 1, Issue 1        Pierce/Trust in Participatory Action 

 

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learning. In CEPA partnerships the identification of 

mistrust due to objectification, lack of positive 

community change, and lack of transparency appear 

unique to the research relationship. While these three 

areas of mistrust may be unique to this particular 

community, it seems unlikely. Historically, as we have 

already described, researchers have not been 

trustworthy partners nor have they named the 

historical trauma inherent in the process. While many 

social science researchers genuinely want to 

implement positive community change, reflecting on, 

and defining the mistrust issue in terms of historical 

trauma has not been common. It is true that 

researchers need to collect data as part of the process. 

However, to aid in community acceptance and trust 

building, while combating the effects of historical 

trauma, the researcher must make the data collection 

as well as analysis processes clear and include 

community members in the process. Further, this 

practice helps to sustain change over time. Being 

completely transparent about the relationship and 

process from the beginning may also increase trust. 

Understanding the avenues of mistrust enhances 

understanding of university-community partnerships 

and provides researchers with methods of community 

engagement to prevent mistrust from the beginning of 

a new project. 

 Given the level of historical trauma inherent in 

the target community of this study, it is clear the 

research team members were focused on finding best 

practices to help to ameliorate the community’s 

historical trauma in this particular project. Yet, the 

research team members were not asked to answer the 

questions posed to them from a trauma-responsive 

stance. In fact, they were asked to answer the 

questions as CEPA researchers. Interestingly, as the 

themes emerged from the answers to the best practices 

question, these practices mirrored most of the basic 

trauma-informed care principles as endorsed by 

SAMHSA. Further, while peer support, a hallmark of 

the SAMHSA principles did not emerge, another 

important principle did -- that of power differentials. 

The SAMHSA trauma-responsive principles did not use 

the term “power”, yet the literature from which 

SAMHSA derived them clearly identified power as an 

issue (Harris & Fallot, 2001). The CEPA literature 

outlines equal partnerships as one way to cope with 

power differentials in the researcher-community 

relationship (Khodyakov, et al. 2016; Israel, 2001). We 

strongly endorse that research teams reflect on power 

and identify ways to share power equally with their 

community partners. Being trustworthy and 

developing trusting, collaborative partnerships can 

help with power sharing.  

 

 The analysis of the data strongly identified the 

theme of trustworthiness and transparency. A 

trustworthy partner does not objectify, is transparent, 

and helps the community to produce positive change. 

We strongly endorse that research teams 
reflect on power and identify ways to 
share power equally with their 
community partners. Being trustworthy 
and developing trusting, collaborative 
partnerships can help with power 
sharing.  

 



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Essentially, being a trustworthy partner could then 

ameliorate the three forms of community mistrust 

identified by this research team.  

Our research team brought a quality 

improvement intervention strategy to the community 

to enhance trauma services. Inherent in our practice is 

teaching our Learning Collaborative teams to use this 

intervention independently thereby enhancing the 

capacity of the community. Essential practices then 

related to this finding include being genuinely 

interested in positive change within the community; 

building capacity by collaborating with as well as 

teaching the community members to use any tested 

interventions independently; and producing 

sustainable change.  

 A trustworthy university partner also learns the 

history of the community and takes historical trauma 

into consideration. They engage in building 

collaborative trusting relationships with members of 

the community within a trauma-responsive manner.  

Creation of relationships must occur in safe 

spaces in which partners can speak freely and honestly 

(voice and choice) about needs and concerns as well as 

attending to power differentials in relationships. 

Developing a process where both the university and 

communities identify and define common terms up 

front and set appropriate group process standards 

helps partners feel equal and safe. It also builds 

collaboration and provides for empowered voice and 

choice. Using common non-jargon language, or if 

necessary defining or explaining issues or concepts, 

helps the community to understand interventions 

and/or research processes. Strategically embedding 

researchers across a room full of community 

stakeholders can also allow for relationships to form. 

Eating meals together as part of the relationship 

building process has been a good way for our team to 

get to know our partners more personally. Further, our 

research team includes community organizers and 

people of color, one of whom currently lives in the 

community, and others who have long standing 

familiarity and trust built within the community. The 

above practices fulfill our promise to the community to 

help devise supportive trauma strategies. This effort 

also begins the process of healing from past 

experiences with researchers.  

 Within a trauma-responsive frame and given 

the level of historical and present day trauma within 

our served community, we endorse identifying the 

strengths of the community and using those strengths 

to enhance the partnership. As one of our team 

reported, there is “lots of wisdom in communities.” 

Trauma-responsive practice is inherently strengths-

based and encourages the paradigm shift in thinking 

from what is wrong with a community to what 

happened to them. When we use community strengths 

and build upon those we build capacity.  

 Given the literature around the need to 

establish trust in CEPA research projects we posit that 

researchers have failed to name the mistrust inherent 

in many communities as historical trauma, nor have 

they taken a trauma-responsive approach to the 

creation and maintenance of CEPA projects. Our 

strong recommendation based on our experience with 

this project includes attending to the inherent trauma 

in communities. It is important to note that many 

communities in which historic trauma is of concern are 

also communities that cope daily with oppression, 



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poverty, racism, classism, and community violence. 

When social scientists fail to take trauma into 

consideration they risk re-traumatizing the very people 

they hope to help.  

The SAMHSA principles of creating safety, 

building trustworthiness and trusting partnerships, 

collaborating, empowering, and identifying strengths 

as expressed in our data with the inclusion of 

attending to power differentials, may help to mitigate 

further trauma by research teams.  

LIMITATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 
 This case study reflects two questions related 

to a mutual CEPA project in which a team of 

researchers and community partners are participating. 

As such, the results are not generalizable per se. 

However, our finding that identification of areas of 

mistrust will help to inform the construct of trust for 

future measurement considerations is important. 

Further, the identification of the SAMHSA trauma 

principles as important best practices leads to practice 

implications for CEPA researchers and provides future 

research questions related to historical trauma of 

communities, along with the trauma caused by 

research within communities, and important practices 

to mitigate such trauma.  

Conclusion 

This case study of one CEPA project to bring trauma 

responsive programming to an African American 

community led to the identification of a deeper 

definition of the construct of trust and best practices. 

These findings appear to mirror many of the SAMHSA 

trauma principles. Future research might consider 

studying the trust construct more closely and 

identifying and studying trauma more closely in 

community-engaged participatory action research 

projects.  

 

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https://doi.org/10.1080/10437797.2015.1072424

	Abstract
	Trust in participatory actions community-engaged partnerships: relationships and historic trauma matter
	Method
	Results
	Discussion
	Limitations and Implications
	References

