The science of developmental psychopathology has made outstanding progress over the past 40 years in understanding adaptive and maladaptive developmental processes across the life span. Yet most of this work has been researcher driven with little involvement of community partners in the research process, limiting the potential public health significance of our work. To continue to advance the field we must move beyond the physical and conceptual walls of our research laboratories and into the real world. In this article, we define and describe the importance of community-engaged research, and present our overarching principles for engaging the community including practicing respect, shared power and decision-making, prioritizing the needs of the community, and engaging in consistent and transparent communication. We present several associated recommendations for best practice and highlight examples from our own research that is grounded in a developmental psychopathology perspective to illustrate these practices. Recommendations for the future of the discipline of development and psychopathology, with emphasis on training and continuing education, are described.

For the last 4 years we have implemented a model to mobilize rural health workers as leaders for HIV prevention in Malawi. We use a conceptual framework that integrates the World Health Organization's (WHO) primary health care (PHC) model, the social–cognitive model of behavioural change, and contextual tailoring of the intervention. Health workers are potential rural HIV prevention leaders because they have community trust and respect. However, their leadership potential has been limited by both health system barriers such as inadequate workers, supplies, and training and personal barriers such as risky occupational and personal behaviours. In the first phase of the project, we developed collaborative relationships and conducted qualitative research to adapt a peer group intervention for rural health workers and community members. In the ongoing second phase, we trained the health workers, who then volunteered and provided the intervention to adults in the communities their health centres serve. The intervention was adapted for young people through a community participatory process. Currently the adapted intervention is being offered to young people. As a guide to replication, we discuss barriers encountered in implementing this collaborative project and how we overcame them. This project demonstrates that health workers can be effective leaders for community AIDS prevention in African countries. The primary health care model offers a feasible, cost-effective and sustainable approach to maximizing health worker-community collaboration to reduce the spread of HIV.