The Great Lakes Community Review Board Begins Its First Pilot Review Process
The Great Lakes Community Review Board has officially begun its first pilot protocol application review process, marking an important early step in advancing more community-led approaches to research ethics, accountability, and participation.
Over the next 4–6 weeks, board members will review an initial application connected to a community-based research process grounded in desire-based, asset-based, and humanizing practices. This pilot process is intended not only to review a specific research proposal, but also to help explore what it means to build ethical review structures that are rooted in community experience, relationships, and shared benefit.
Traditional institutional review processes often focus primarily on institutional liability and procedural compliance. Community review boards offer a complementary approach — one that asks broader questions about trust, reciprocity, community impact, accessibility, and whether research processes meaningfully reflect the hopes, priorities, and lived realities of the communities involved.
As this first pilot review unfolds, City Rising will document key lessons, tensions, questions, and emerging practices from the experience. Following the completion of the initial review, City Rising will publish a public learning paper sharing insights and discoverables from the process. The paper will explore how community review boards can support more participatory, relational, and humanizing approaches to community-based research while helping strengthen ethical reflection beyond traditional academic or institutional models.
This pilot process represents an early contribution to a growing national conversation about the future of ethical community-engaged research and the importance of ensuring that communities are not simply subjects of research, but active participants in shaping how research is designed, reviewed, interpreted, and shared.
To learn more about the project and follow along as the pilot review process continues, visit the Great Lakes Community Review Board project page.