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Previous research has highlighted the importance of engaging people with lived experience (PWLE) in the knowledge creation process. However, diverse approaches to engagement exist. In addition, tensions remain in community-engaged research (CER), including how to address structural inequalities in research settings. This study aims to consider how CER interacts with citizenship within and beyond the research context.

This study discusses the authors’ experiences as a majority-PWLE of psychosis research team in Canada, including successes and challenges the authors experienced building their team and navigating research institutions. This study also reflects on the authors’ pathways through citizenship, prior to and during the research process. This study discusses divergent models of CER and their applicability to the cyclical process of citizenship and community participation.

Relationships between academic and peer researchers developed organically over time. However, this study was limited by structural barriers such as pay inequality and access to funding. The authors recognize that there are barriers to full citizenship and acknowledge their resources and privilege of being well supported within their communities. Team members built on a foundation of citizenship to access participation in research. This led to opportunities to engage in community spaces, and for PWLE to participate in research as partners and leaders. This study also found that citizenship is a way of giving back, by building a sense of social responsibility.

Academic and peer researchers can reflect on the authors’ experiences to build more inclusive research teams and communities by using a citizenship approach to research participation.

COVID-19 is bringing hardship and tragedy. Health workers are having to take appalling risks; loved ones are being lost; lockdown is causing great distress. And, as always in testing times, the disadvantaged are being hit worst. As we emerge from the shadows, the call from the vested interests, from the systems current winners, will be for a rapid return to business as usual. We must resist this; business as usual got us into this mess.

COVID-19 is trying to tell us something; we health educators and social marketers must listen, think and, above all, take action.

The purpose of this paper is to determine what types of sustainability activities companies are reporting and whether persons external to the companies understand how those reported activities correspond to the companies’ narratives about sustainability. That is to ascertain how people interpret the meaning of the activities included in the sustainability reports.

From a sample of sustainability reports prepared by Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines, the authors identified the distinct activities reported. The authors prepared a survey comprised of these activities and asked a sample of people knowledgeable about business and investing to evaluate each activity on the extent to which they are relevant to sustainability performance. The responses were then factor analyzed to identify the most important dimensions of sustainability these persons employed to relate the activities to sustainability.

The dimensions employed by the subjects differed in some significant ways from those dimensions used to construct the GRI format. Subjects evaluated sustainability efforts as primarily efforts of being a good citizen with sustainability an end in itself rather than as constraint to be respected in achieving profitability goals.

The study is a first attempt so results are preliminary, i.e. suggestive but not definitive. Though preliminary an intriguing implication is that closure on a sustainability reporting structure would be premature. More effort needs to be devoted to provide more clarity on the concept of corporate sustainability and what its implications are for corporate behavior.

Given the results that sustainability be regarded as a corporate end, what is the role of the corporation in society seems still to be disputatious. Sustainability may not be something achievable without changes in corporate law.

The study is an early attempt to assess the potential alternative narratives about corporate sustainability. Its value lies in providing insights into the age-old question of what should be the role of the corporation in a free society.