Working with community partners: Insights from a student researcher

While I was applying for graduate school at Stanford, I looked up research groups within the Stanford Graduate School of Education and came across the Gardner Center. With its focus on conducting research with communities to directly support them, the Gardner Center caught my attention. I then took a one-week summer class on community-based research at the Stanford Haas Center for Public Service and, with my growing interest in conducting this type of work, decided to reach out. A few email exchanges and meetings later, I joined the Gardner Center’s team as a student researcher on a project with San Mateo County executives, who sought to understand areas for improving their use of data on community engagement.

Through this opportunity, I learned important lessons about community-based research that I hope may be useful for future student researchers interested in the Gardner Center or in conducting research with and for communities. I know I will be taking these lessons back with me as I embark on my next chapter as a policymaker in my home country and as a PhD student in the future.

Listening is a vital skill

Throughout the project with San Mateo County, listening was a very important skill on multiple levels. First, as a new member of the research team, I had to listen carefully to the instructions to understand how I could best support the project. Second, the research team had to listen to the community partner — the San Mateo County executives — to understand what the partner desired and needed. Third, through interviews with members of various San Mateo County departments, I learned the ways in which those public officials routinely listen to community voices from the different parts of the county. Thus, while I developed data collection and analysis skills as part of my time at the Gardner Center, listening was definitely a key skill that I had to practice constantly.

The relationship between community and research team is nuanced

I learned that the relationship between community and research team involves many interests that must be navigated as the partnership unfolds. On the one hand, researchers may want to support the community, but they also want to advance knowledge about the topic at hand and think about the broader implications of a research project to theory and practice. On the other hand, community partners may want very specific, personalized advice about what practices they should employ to solve their problems, and they might already have ideas of best practices that they want to validate through research. In this complex context, open communication between the two parties is necessary for a partnership to develop in a healthy, productive manner that is mutually beneficial.

Community-based research bridges a communication gap

Prior to joining the Gardner Center, one problem I heard from policymakers is that research results can be interesting but lose their usefulness due to the length of time it takes for analysis and publication. This means that there is a communication gap between researchers and policymakers or other community members who could benefit from the knowledge developed through research. Community-based research can help bridge that communication gap. First, community-based researchers are (ideally) attentive to community needs and desires from the inception of the research problem. Second, community-based research involves regular communication with community partners, meaning that these partners can follow the data collection and analysis process more easily — and gather actionable learnings along the way. This helps research get closer to the communities that could benefit from it.

As I go on to conduct further research, I hope to take these lessons with me so that I can be a better partner for the communities in, with, and for which I conduct research. In particular, I want to keep partnering with communities in and beyond Brazil (my home country) to advance civic and citizenship education that strengthens a pro-democratic culture. To that end, the lessons that I learned during my time at the Gardner Center will be helpful while I pursue a PhD as well as later in my career.

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Giácomo Rabaiolli Ramos graduated with his master's degree in international education policy analysis from Stanford Graduate School of Education in 2025. He is interested in education policy, civic education, and community-based research.