Learnings from a community-engaged ICES research project

Presenters: Dr. Susitha Wanigaratne and Manvir Bhangu

When using race, ethnicity, or immigration data, research teams are encouraged to engage with communities and stakeholders as early as possible in the research process to contextualize and action findings. This session will explore an exemplary ICES research project led by Dr. Susitha Wanigaratne in partnership with Manvir Bhangu, a community member and mobilizer. The co-presenters will describe lessons learned around best practices, successes, and challenges of working in an academic-community partnership.

0:00 – Introduction
8:00 – Community engagement in health equity research
19:17 – Our research process
45:52 – Lessons learned
55:25 – Q&A

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Dr. Susitha Wanigaratne, PhD is a Senior Research Associate at the Edwin S.H. Leong Centre for Healthy Children at the SickKids Research Institute and a Fellow at ICES. As a social epidemiologist her work examines immigration as a structural and social determinant of health. She is interested in community-based participatory research methods which fuse the lived experience and perspectives of community members with the power of analytics from population-based administrative health and social data. Her aim is to contribute to and help facilitate positive social change which improves the health and well-being of marginalized and minoritized communities. As part of her post-doctoral work, she collaborated with several non-profit organizations in the Greater Toronto Area on both quantitative and qualitative research projects to better understand the phenomenon of son preference in the South Asian community. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology and a Masters of Health Science in Epidemiology and Community Health from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.

Manvir Bhangu is a gender equity and human rights advocate and a community mobilizer. Manvir is the Founder of Laadliyan, a nonprofit that empowers South Asian daughters through education, engagement and awareness. In 2018, Manvir was honoured with Brampton’s Top 40 Under 40 award by the Brampton Board of Trade and in 2022, Manvir was awarded the Women Working in Social Activism on Behalf of Women and Children Award by the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario.