BCCHR Community Partnership Super Hub

The Community Partnership Super Hub (CPSH) works to advance two of BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute’s (BCCHR’s) Strategic Research Priorities:

• Enable Health Systems, Community, and Societal Research
• Invest in Indigenous Health Research

Our objective is to build capacity for meaningful, community-partnered research that involves long-term, inclusive, and impactful collaboration with children, youth, families, communities, and organizations.

Guided by Indigenous principles of relational accountability, respect, reciprocity, and relevance in community-based participatory and co-designed research, the CPSH has established long-term relationships with Indigenous youth, families, Elders, and an Indigenous Cultural Facilitator and Knowledge Keeper in Metro Vancouver and across BC.

By centering the perspectives of children, youth, and families through community-based, participatory, and co-designed research, researchers at the BCCHR can foster self-determination and safety, aligning with calls for decolonial and anti-oppressive research practices.

Mission Statement

Our mission is to advance child, youth, and family health through decolonial and anti-oppressive research practices grounded in relational accountability and meaningful co-design at all stages. By building accountable, reciprocal, and sustained partnerships with communities, we challenge extractive research traditions, honour lived and Indigenous knowledges, and generate evidence that supports equity, self-determination, and systems change. We recognize that this is slow and oftentimes messy work that requires time, resources, ongoing reflexivity and improvisation, and self and community care.

Defining Community

For this initiative, community is understood as complex, dynamic, and self-defined—never assumed, fixed, or imposed. Communities may take many forms, including geographic, cultural, relational, or experiential, and may shift over time. We intentionally challenge “us versus them” dichotomies, recognizing that researchers, clinicians, children, youth, families, and partners are often part of overlapping and evolving communities rather than separate entities.

Communities are grounded in shared lived experiences, mutual support, and interconnected relationships, while also encompassing significant diversity within and across groups. Importantly, not all groups will identify as a “community,” and we respect the right of individuals and groups to define who they are, how they relate, and whether collective identity is meaningful to them. Community, in this context, is always in motion, always changing—shaped by relationships, histories, power, and place—and community partnership requires attentiveness, humility, and relational accountability to this continual change.

Land Acknowledgement

BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute operates on the ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Further, this acknowledgement, gratitude, and respect extends to all of the First Nations communities on whose territories the Research Institute builds relationships and operates in British Columbia and the Yukon.