The Lessons from the Field. Community-based participatory research: The important role of university-community partnerships to support grandfamilies

Objective This article describes the development and implementation of a tripartite educational intervention to support custodial grandparents, grandchildren, and service providers who work with grandfamilies. Background Grounded in theory and practice of working with both grandparents and their grandchildren, this article provides an overview of strategies and approaches for recruitment and retention of grandfamilies in educational intervention programming and a discussion of our approach to bridging science into practice and the important role of university-community partnerships using community-based participatory research principles. Implications Although we provide specific examples from the development and implementation of the multistate GRANDcares program, these methods and the lessons from the field may be broadly applied to many aspects of working with skipped-generation and multigenerational families.