Working with community researchers to enhance rural community engagement around Private Water Supplies: an exploration of the benefits and challenges

Funding: CREW: Scotland's centre of expertise for waters; the Scottish Government's Strategic Research Programme (2016-2021).This project employed community researchers as a means of improving community engagement around their Private Water Supplies (PWS) in rural Scotland. In this paper, we reflect on working with community researchers in terms of the benefits and challenges of the approach for future rural research that seeks to improve community engagement. The paper (1) critiques the involvement of community researchers for rural community engagement, drawing on the experiences in this project and (2) provides suggestions for good practice for working with community researchers in rural communities’ research. We offer some context in terms of the role of community members in research, the importance of PWS, our approach to community researchers, followed by the methodological approach and findings and our conclusions to highlight that community researchers can be beneficial for enhancing community engagement, employability, and social capital. Future community researcher approaches need to be fully funded to ensure core researchers can fulfil their duty of care, which should not stop when data collection is finished. Community researchers need to be supported in two main ways: as continuing faces of the project after the official project end date and to transfer their newly acquired skills to future employment opportunitiesPublisher PDFPeer reviewe

Environmental science and mental health review: final report to NERC valuing nature programme

The project sought to examine where and how the environmental sciences might contribute to the mental health domain, and to identify exemplar case studies, highlight gaps, and outline areas for potential future investment. The final report, which summaries findings from the project, is now published