Abstract
Lay Summary: When research teams make new health discoveries, findings must reach the communities that can benefit. This poster explores how small grants to support community distribution of partnered research can speed up the real-world use of research results. These community events help ensure findings don’t stay in the ivory tower—they are shared with communities to improve lives. They also bring valuable community input, spark new research ideas, and can lead to additional funding. Over four rounds, 15 projects were funded across Michigan. By supporting teams to share their research results directly with the people it impacts, community dissemination helps move research into action faster. This poster highlights how this funding model strengthens community-academic partnerships and accelerates translation.
Objectives/Goals: To demonstrate how small grant funding (up to $5,000) for the dissemination of community-academic partnered research findings can accelerate translation by delivering relevant, actionable information to communities, supporting ongoing partnerships, and catalyzing future research and funding opportunities.
Methods/Study Population: Promoting Academic and Community Engagement (PACE) dissemination grants were awarded through a competitive funding mechanism. Over four funding cycles, the program received 25 submissions and funded 15 projects, awarding a total of $75,000 to projects across Michigan. The grants supported established community-academic partnerships to share their community-engaged research (CEnR) findings with communities of interest. Dissemination was defined as returning research results to non-academic audiences to accelerate translation. Traditional scholarly dissemination (e.g., publications or conferences) was not eligible. All awardees submitted final reports detailing their dissemination strategies, impacts, and outcomes.
Results/Anticipated Results: The PACE grants were designed to accelerate the translation of research into communities through focused, community-facing dissemination. Across four funding cycles, 15 funded projects reported employing broad dissemination strategies, including community forums, multimedia campaigns, artistic expression, and local events. Final reports described increased community awareness, enhanced trust and engagement, and momentum for follow-up collaborations and funding proposals. The poster will present key findings and selected examples to illustrate how modest, targeted investments can lead to measurable impacts in research translation at the community level.
Discussion/Significance of Impact: This poster will highlight how CTSAs can implement scalable, low-cost funding mechanisms to support community dissemination of research. Programs like PACE foster academic-community engagement, accelerate translation of findings, and offer a replicable model for supporting community-centered translational science.
