CEPP is a sister project of the Living Roots Project. A research project funded by The British Academy, it aims to understand how three very diverse city settings understood, approached and experienced ‘community engagement’ for pandemic preparedness and how this shaped equity and inequality during the Covid-19 pandemic — for example, whether some groups of people were worse affected by the pandemic than others.

The project also aims to consider how community engagement for pandemic preparedness may have changed in the wake of Covid-19, in light of any lessons learned from these experiences.

The three cities in this study include Ealing, London (UK), Marseille, France (its Northern Districts) and Cleveland, Ohio (US). Previous research suggests three very different approaches have been taken in these cities. More specifically, we will compare community engagement along five dimensions including: purposes, institutions, people, relationships and processes. The project will achieve this by conducting interviews with people in local government, health systems, and civil society and communities in the three cities.