Gail, I appreciate your response. Thank you very much. 

Now I’m going to speak to the list as the VOICE of COMMUNITY – read in
booming tones -, on behalf of a large number of groups with which I’m in
contact in BC. 

Among the problems from our perspective are the assumptions by many that:

1. our knowledges and praxis require framing into jargonese because
policymakers will not heed our voices otherwise.
2. most community groups are incapable of doing their own research without
academic assistance.
3. community groups see the need for more research.

The answer to #1 is robust activism. Assumption #2 is false. So is
assumption #3. As Theresa mentioned, people have literally been researched
to death. We’ve seen far too many suicides and death by welfare in our
communities. ACTION is needed; we’ve had it with research.

“Really the funding is controlled not by universities or communities but
political agendas and parties.” And governments fund research, which they
assume to be the sole province of universities. 

Yes, there are programs like CIHR and CURA, but the university is
automatically given the research lead. Community groups must scramble and
waste already limited resources to get government funding; we wind up
competing with one another for the scare dollars. Universities get funding
all the time. With one exception, in every case that we’re aware of in which
there is supposed to be community-university collaboration – a partnership,
in other words -, the university controls all the money. In the one case,
the university was still the official recipient of the funding, but the
university partner handed over half the money to the community group to
manage. This is an empowerment issue and is vitally important to
marginalized groups.

“Communities do not always have the skills.” Some groups within a community
may not, but we’ve yet to find a community that, as a collective of
individuals, doesn’t have all the skills it needs. Lack of funding is again
the problem, not lack of skills.
 
“On the ‘critical appraisal skills’ for research, this is seen to be one of
the prominent reasons that research is not used by people making decisions.”
For politicians, rather than ‘reasons’, I’d substitute ‘excuse’. They do not
lack the information, or the understanding of same, to make decisions; they
a slew of staff to do the interpretation if need be. No, it's not lack of
critical appraisal skills for them; it's lack of will. 

“This was not comment on the intellect of the community people, but people
in general who could benefit from understanding a particular bit of
information, or research.” Perhaps it’s researchers who need to learn to
speak plain language.

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