Aaron Hicks didn’t have it in his plan to build and advise research at the Center for Healthy Minds (CHM). Dekila Chungyalpa didn’t know she’d lay the groundwork to create a documentary film for and by Indigenous people. And, Dan Grupe and Christy Wilson-Mendenhall didn’t realize they’d regularly participate in mindfulness groups that help sustain community research projects with justice-impacted people. Yet, all of these things are central to the rigor, reach and impact of their work at CHM. 

When Wisconsin community members, like Hicks, and academic partners, like Chungyalpa, Grupe and Wilson-Mendhall, collaborate as equal partners, they find paths to build programs and do research together that’s aimed at promoting wellbeing and flourishing. The beauty and power of these connections are referred to as “community-engaged” work, where academic partners and community members alike challenge the traditional constraints of what “expertise” is and who exactly is an “expert.”

“It’s really about the best of both worlds, the academic understanding along with the lived experience,” says Hicks, who is a CHM community partner and non-profit founder and co-executive. “When you bring these things together, it’s really powerful.”

Community-engaged approaches are centered in the needs, priorities, and solutions emerging from communities themselves—rather than traditional, sometimes extractive, or even harmful approaches. Yet, researchers and program leaders who do community-engaged projects sometimes face misconceptions about what “community-engaged” really means and what makes the process of these programs and research effective, equitable and more impactful. 

“Sometimes people get the impression that this is charity work or us helping communities,” says Dr. Grupe, who is a CHM research assistant professor. “But it really is in service of doing work that is more rigorous, because it utilizes more knowledge and information that we don’t have access to through our academic studies or our lived experiences.”

Reimagining the rules of academic-community partnerships

Chungyalpa, director of the Loka Initiative and research collaborator at CHM, points out that community-engaged work differs from traditional approaches, which “listen” primarily to formal products of knowledge-gathering such as scientific literature. 

“What we’re doing is putting the needs and desires of the community front and center,” she explains. 

The process of “deep listening” is a core element of community-engaged work that sets it apart and has led Chungyalpa and the Loka team to community-based projects with and without a research component, encompassing both local Wisconsin and global communities. Emphasizing the interdependencies among inner, community, and planetary resilience, the Loka Initiative centers the emotional and mental wellbeing of individuals and communities within the context of addressing ecological wellbeing. Loka also focuses on the Indigenous communities who are most often impacted by the climate crisis.

One community partnership project that emerged from years of deep listening and engagement with Indigenous elders and knowledge holders is called Sacred Wisdom Sacred Earth (SWSE). This vibrant feature-length documentary film explores how humans might live in harmony with Mother Earth through the richness of Indigenous ecological knowledge, especially rooted in the tribal communities of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. 

The documentary is a project Chungyalpa didn’t imagine coming to life when her team began exploring a partnership with tribal members and the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Council. 

“We’re figuring out—with the community—what they need and how we can meet those needs,” she says. “We are trying to harness all the power that Loka has access to at the university and with our many other partners and turn it into service for local communities, especially those that are marginalized or historically disadvantaged.”

At its core, the film is a “love letter” to Indigenous youth to not only pass along generations of wisdom but also to cultivate a sense of pride and resilience among these youth, says Chungyalpa. Since its release in November 2025, Loka continues to engage communities across Wisconsin with SWSE through community screenings of the film that have community-led panels and workshops to deepen the experience.

When communities lead, research gets stronger

CHM’s work with tribal communities throughout the state is one key example of a partnership project that embodies UW–Madison’s Wisconsin Idea. The “Wisconsin Idea” means the university’s work should have an impact across communities far and wide, and especially in its home state. Within this context, researchers highlight how community-engaged work serves the broader public while also strengthening the knowledge gained through research. 

Another community-engaged initiative at CHM is living out the Wisconsin Idea through research aimed at disrupting cycles of harm and trauma for people involved in the criminal legal system. The Cultivating Justice CoLaboratory (CoLab) has over a dozen community and academic team members, including Grupe and Wilson-Mendenhall. In their work with currently and formerly incarcerated individuals, the CoLab team has found that a community-based approach is essential for effectively serving people who have been historically marginalized. 

Researchers seek guidance from the voices that have been absent or excluded from academic spaces — often those who stand to benefit the most from the research insights. 

“It’s really thinking about, ‘How do we embody compassion in our everyday work?’ This includes how we’re doing the research, how we’re developing relationships—and building cultures of care in everything that we do,” says Dr. Wilson-Mendenhall, a CHM research assistant professor.

By co-developing research questions, methods, and interventions through community partnerships, research outcomes become more relevant to what communities actually want, rather than what researchers may assume. Like other community-engaged work at CHM, community members’ lived expertise within the CoLab guides scientific priorities and outcomes, where scientific ways of knowing often fall short. Initially, Hicks says, he wasn’t expecting this type of approach to scientific research. 

“What has surprised me, is them really taking the time out to really hear the community and approaching research a little differently in that aspect,” he says about the CoLab partnership.

Formerly incarcerated community partners are core members of the CoLab and burgeoning community-based researchers in their own right, says Grupe. For the past five years, CoLab community partners Hicks and Deb Mejchar, a leader in the restorative justice space in Wisconsin, have helped plan and lead community advisory board meetings utilizing their lived expertise as formerly incarcerated community members. Their guidance is central to each stage of the research process, from participant recruitment to data collection to intervention development. For example, their experience led to the decision to entrust formerly incarcerated peers to do intake interviews with study participants, rather than UW–Madison staff. Their insights made it easier to establish greater trust and credibility with study participants from the very start of the project.

“We want to be that bridge for the academic world to connect with the community and vice versa,” Hicks says. 

They also do peer-to-peer recruiting and have co-facilitated 8-week mindfulness groups with Dr. Carmen Alonso, who offers mindfulness practices to currently and formerly incarcerated individuals through her non-profit organization Just Mindfulness. 

Current community-engaged research projects in the CoLab include a project to develop and evaluate a mindfulness-based curriculum for the reentry period, funded by the National Institutes of Health, and a  “train-the-trainer” project that prepares formerly incarcerated partners to offer these practices in their own communities, funded by the Dana Foundation.

Another result of community partners’ advice is the CoLab’s monthly dinners and “community mindfulness” drop-in sessions for formerly incarcerated community members at CHM. These gatherings allow more experienced practitioners and those new to mindfulness to practice together in a space that fosters safety, connection, and belonging.

“One of the impacts I see is what happens when you can really create a safe space for people to be vulnerable and feel the power of the community, of other people who understand what they’re going through,” says Wilson-Mendenhall. “Practicing meditation looks really different in that space.”

This, Grupe says, “is something that can only be engendered by people who have credibility and trust within the community—it truly is a co-created space.” As researchers, “on our own we would have no way to create the conditions that allow for people to really get to that depth of engagement and practice and healing.”

A vision of science through community 

While the power of collaborative initiatives has been demonstrated through experience, researchers note that incentive structures in academia—securing grants, publishing papers, earning tenure—are not always aligned with the process and values of true co-creation. The support from individual donors have made this work possible. Grupe, Chungyalpa and Wilson-Mendenhall, along with other community-engaged researchers at CHM, look to make community-first approaches more authentic by sharing their work, supporting emerging scholars, and advocating for community voices in the grantmaking processes as well as when and how research is shared.

“I would love to see community-based research approaches be normalized so that it actually centers the needs of the community first and this becomes part of a set of values researchers use, no matter what field they’re in or what kind of academic institution they’re in,” says Chungyalpa.

Still, the impacts of true community-engaged projects, for communities, program leaders and researchers alike, stand as a testament to the power of partnership, Grupe says. 

“We have access to so much knowledge and wisdom accumulated over centuries that has a lot of promise in improving wellbeing and reducing suffering. But just putting that information out there is not necessarily making it accessible or relevant for everyone; the impact is limited with traditional ways of doing science and disseminating science,” said Grupe. “It takes a lot of intentionality and establishing trusting relationships to fully realize CHM’s mission of moving toward a kinder, wiser, more compassionate world.” 

By Anne Johnson and Victoria Vlisides

Featured photo: Loka community partners and collaborators film Sacred Wisdom Sacred Earth on location.