A University-Community Partnership to Advance Research in Practice Settings: The HUB Research Model

Human service organizations are uniquely positioned, given their scope of practice and access to consumers with the widest range of needs to significantly increase the national capacity for research if they were effectively equipped with the knowledge, skills, and funding to integrate research and development into their ongoing organizational activities. A university-community research partnership is one approach to achieving this goal. This article describes the Hillside/UB (HUB) Research Model, a formal research partnership between Hillside Family of Agencies (HFA) in Rochester, NY and the Buffalo Center for Social Research (BCSR) at the University at Buffalo (UB). The HUB research model combines the practice expertise and research subject access of HFA with the BCSR research expertise and resources to develop collaboratively a vibrant research partnership based on community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles that garners the strengths and assets of both partners to realize a true research to practice and practice to research agenda.