Relationships Before Research: Notes from Direct Community Engagement in One Health

Welcome to the third annual MCG-GS Savannah Community Engaged Research Conference. Today brings together students, faculty, clinicians, and community partners from Georgia Southern University and the Medical College of Georgia around a central guiding question: How can research improve health in Coastal Georgia? This year’s theme, Bridging Science, Care, and Community in the AI Era, runs through the program, from talks on trust in AI-enabled care to field projects with fishing communities, farm families, firefighters, and nursing home staff. We hope you leave with new ideas, new questions, and new collaborators. This session draws on the community-based work conducted through the Institute for Health Logistics & Analytics (IHLA) at Georgia Southern University. Specifically, IHLA team members will discuss two community engagement projects, the Community Health Resource Project (CHRP) in rural Georgia, USA, and Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) work in County Wexford, Ireland, to showcase the importance of relationship building and how it can and should shape research design. In Georgia, the work began with listening and trust-building, which led to mapping local One Health assets, the people, resources, and networks connecting human, animal, and environmental health in the community. In Wexford, that same community-first approach shaped the KAP engagement process, informing not just what questions were asked, but who was asked and how answers were understood. But the process itself matters as much as what is produced. The work done with these community members, driven by strengths-based conversations, facilitated a space where future partnerships could continue despite the change in project focus, a reminder that relationships built through genuine engagement outlast any single project's scope. Insights from the workshop will make the case for flipping the usual research sequence: community engagement isn't a step before "real" research, but rather it's the foundation that makes research accurate, useful, and durable enough to hold when priorities shift. Attendees will leave with practical takeaways for building genuine community partnerships and translating that groundwork into stronger, community-informed research.