Harrisburg Healthcare's Dr. Whisenant Featured in Research Paper with Medical College of Georgia

10/21/25, 4:00 PM

Dr. Ebony Whisenant, medical director at the HUB's Harrisburg Family Healthcare Clinic, has partnered with research faculty colleagues at the Medical College of Georgia to help develop the Co-Researcher Activation Network (CRANE) to cultivate restorative engagement through ongoing transformational relationships. Informed by the Culture-Centered Approach, CRANE is a network of community member groups who identify local health concerns, develop research questions, and generate community-driven solutions. Organized by place rather than interest, groups are systematically created within geographic areas. The model focuses on engaging community members as “co-researchers,” whereby community members play an active role and share in the decision-making process through a collaborative and interdependent relationship with the research team.

In a peer-reviewed study published by BMC Journals, "Building and sustaining restorative community trust and engagement: the Co-Researcher Activation Network," the CRANE team concluded that it could effectively serve as a "blueprint for community engagement that honors community members and their expertise, strives for equitable partnership, and moves the needle on metrics of trust. The theoretically-grounded, co-researcher model can not only build but sustain restorative community trust and engagement." Further, the team found that such a co-researcher network "that actively involved community members in decision-making throughout the course of research cultivated restorative trust and engagement through transformational relationships.

The full study can be found at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40900-025-00792-2.