Engagement with communities, particularly those to which one does not belong, should be preceded by a period of preparation and self-examination. During this period, the community-engaged researcher should:

• Learn as much as possible about the community
• Explore the diversity and cultures within it
• Become familiar with issues of foremost concern to community members
• Explore one’s own attitudes, assumptions, and biases regarding the community and its members
• Reflect on one’s motivations for engaging

Get to know the communities.

Before engaging with a community:
Learn about its history, economic conditions, demographic trends, political and power structures, diversity, cultures, norms, values, and perspectives.
Explore its past experiences with exploitative, extractive, and stigmatizing research practices that may have left members harmed and rightly mistrustful of researchers.
Familiarize yourself with past community- or researcher-driven efforts to address the focal issue and related issues.

Get to know the topic.

Although it is ideal for communities to select the topic or issue that a particular community-engaged effort will address, in reality academics have specialized expertise and are not qualified to explore every topic within a focal issue. This means that every act of engagement involves a mutual exploration of community interests and needs relative to academic expertise and availability. Sometimes good matches can be hard to find.
It is incumbent on researchers to immerse themselves in the relevant academic literature on the topic and how it has impacted the community. It is their responsibility to bring this knowledge base to the engagement table.
It is also important for academics to humbly acknowledge that their university-based knowledge includes gaps, biases, and blind spots, and that the knowledge of the topic or issue held by people in communities directly impacted by it is of equal, if not greater, value.

Practice self-reflection.

Before engaging with communities, community-engaged researchers, especially those who are not members of the communities with whom they hope to engage, should take time to examine the explicit or implicit attitudes, assumptions, prejudices, and biases that shape their perceptions of those communities and their members.
In addition, community-engaged researchers should examine their motivations for working with certain communities, reflect on why they think they are the right person to do the work, and consider whether they harbor visions of themselves as heroes or saviors.
Finally, researchers should be cognizant of their privileges in relation to community partners/members and how those privileges may serve as obstacles to understanding the lived experiences of community members and establishing collaborative research processes that involve mutual learning and equitably sharing power and resources.