Community perspectives and responses to potentially establishing an ethnic community–led research and evaluation centre

This report presents the findings from a study conducted to get community perspectives and responses to potentially establishing an Ethnic Community-led Research and Evaluation Centre in Aotearoa, New Zealand. As part of this study, we also reached out to organisations that carried out similar research to find out how they have been established and run their organisations.
The report is based on findings from interviews, focus groups and a community survey conducted in 2021. As it stands, Aotearoa New Zealand has a number of small research centres that have some focus on ethnic communities. These exist within university institutes as well as independent organisations such as the Centre for Asian and Ethnic Minority Health Research and Evaluation (CAHRE), the Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research at Victoria University and the Migrant and Refugee Research Centre at Auckland University of Technology. In the last decade, there has been an increase in community and grassroot initiatives that collate ethnic community research, such as ‘Community Research,’ and ‘Changemakers’ who partnered on collating a research collection from refugee-background and ethnic migrant communities. However, a gap exists for a dedicated ethnic community-led research and evaluation centre that is committed to the production and dissemination of ethnic community research.