Community researcher link worker (CRLW) roles are crucial to ensuring culturally appropriate research and providing a balanced voice to research projects. Multiple terminologies exist to represent community members working in research teams; however, for this project, we will use the term CRLW, as this is what the Deep End Research Alliance team prefers to use. This is because these individuals did not hold formal research credentials but instead received informal basic training on specific data collection techniques from researchers.

This project aimed to extend the impact of various projects across the university, which have resulted in the development of CRLW roles in a range of underserved communities, upskilling them to recruit participants, conduct interviews and/or facilitate focus groups in their communities. The project celebrates and shares diverse ways that faculties or research networks within TUoS are engaging the CRLW, identifying best practices and practical steps. These were then be developed into a comprehensive, interactive, easy-to-understand toolkit to provide guidance for new researchers. While there are many toolkits for engaging communities that may provide some useful tips, these have some limitations as they were not specifically developed around engaging CRLWs from underserved communities.