Building and Sustaining Community-Academic Partnerships in Academic Medicine

Lessons learned from the 2023-2025 AAMC Nurturing Experiences for Tomorrow’s Community Leaders (NEXT) Grant

Communities across the United States continue to face significant health challenges shaped by social, structural, institutional, cultural, and environmental factors, among others. Addressing these issues requires meaningful collaboration between academic health systems, medical schools, and the communities they serve. 

Medical schools and academic health systems are uniquely positioned to prepare the next generation of health professionals to build and sustain partnerships with communities, ensuring that health initiatives are informed by community needs and priorities. Meaningful collaboration with patients, families, and communities is essential to improving health, strengthening institutional relevance, and ensuring that academic medicine is responsive to the needs and lived experiences of the people it serves. 

Embracing community collaboration as academic medicine’s fourth mission area and elevating it alongside education, research, and clinical care requires institutions to recognize patients and community members as experts, center lived experience in decision-making and learning and work environments, and invest in relationships grounded in equity, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. 

The AAMC Nurturing Experiences for Tomorrow’s Community Leaders (NEXT) Grant was established in 2019* to support AAMC-member institutions in developing or enhancing learning opportunities for medical students, residents, and other health professions learners in partnership with community organizations. In 2023, the AAMC awarded NEXT Grants to five medical schools to partner with community organizations on two-year initiatives designed to advance health equity in their local communities. 

Across these collaborative initiatives, consistent themes emerged regarding what it takes to build meaningful, sustainable partnerships between medical schools, academic health systems, and the communities they serve. We translated these key themes into Four Core Pillars for action with Ten Practical Recommendations for engaging patients, families, and communities as partners in academic medicine.

These core pillars and recommendations are designed for faculty, staff, learners, and community partners looking to develop and strengthen community-academic partnerships and community-partnered educational initiatives. They can assist in assessing existing relationships and approaches, identify opportunities to strengthen collaboration, and inform the development, implementation, refinement, and sustainability of educational initiatives that meaningfully engage patients and communities.

Guiding Questions for Reflection accompany each recommendation and encourage deeper consideration of how the recommendations apply to your institutional and community contexts, and Partnership in Practice Quotes and Vignettes highlight project experiences and examples from the NEXT Grant recipients, illustrating how aspects of the recommendations were applied in practice.

Use the menu above to explore the Core Pillars and Recommendations for building and sustaining community-academic partnerships in academic medicine.

Contact

For more information, please email Katrice D. Cain, MA, director of patient and community partnership development.

The AAMC extends its sincere appreciation to the 2023-2025 NEXT Grant recipients, community partners, learners, and AAMC staff whose experiences, expertise, and thoughtful contributions informed the development of this resource.

AAMC Staff Authors

Katrice D. Cain, MA, Director of Patient & Community Partnership Development
Katy Carkuff-Corey, Community, Opportunity, and Engagement Specialist
Clarence J. Fluker, MA, Patient, Family, and Community Engagement Senior Director

2023-2025 NEXT Grant Recipients

Albert Einstein College of Medicine | Community Partner: Take Back the Bronx
Ellen Tattleman, Ekua Ansah-Samuels, Tanya White-Davis, Heather Archer-Dyer, Lisa Ortega, Andrea Littleton, Earlyn Wiliams, Malik Branch, Vivian Kim, Kawther Coppin, Melanie Lambert, Fides Elamparo, Alexandra Perez, Shirley Leyro

University of California, Riverside School of Medicine | Community Partner: Advocate for Nurturing Transition (ANT) Consulting
Daniel Novak, Adwoa Osei, Michelle C. Burroughs, Hazel Lambert, Joyce Clarke, Mary (Tomi) Obideyi, Yvette Dubel, Arturo Chavez, Brooke Malone, Destiny Prudhomme, Marvellous Osunde, Foluwasomi Oyefeso, Imani Ashmeade

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Community Partner: Birth Sisters Doula
Kristin Tully, LaToshia Rouse, Genevieve Neal-Perry, Rachel Urrutia, Omar Young, Narges Farahi, Morgan McEachern, Jen Martini, Phoebe Wescott

Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine | Community Partners: Eliminating Racism and Creating/Celebrating Equity (ERACCE) and Integrated Services of Kalamazoo (ISK)
Cheryl Dickson, Matt Longjohn, Tonya Mitchell, Shadi Adineh, Jeffrey Greene, Jordan Evans, Sara Carroll-Muniz, Manuel Bernal Carmona, Dianne Shaffer

Yale School of Medicine | Community Partner: Women Against Mass Incarceration (WAMI)
Lisa B. Puglisi, Carmen Black, Tiheba Bain, Monya Saunders, Sharon Ostfeld-Johns

Learn about their NEXT Grant initiatives

*The 2019 and 2020 cycles of the AAMC NEXT Grant were supported by Cooperative Agreement Number 5 NU36OE000007 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.