Immigrant and refugee communities experience barriers to accessing services and disparities in health outcomes. One means for addressing the health of these populations is community based participatory action research (CBPAR). CBPAR has the potential to improve the health of immigrant and refugee communities by generating research that is relevant to the community, informed by the experiences of community, and applied within a community-cultural context. However, CBPAR has created few successful models for facilitating relationship building and collaboration between community members and researchers beyond single partnerships or projects. Therefore, the long term goal of our project is to produce a sustainable CBPAR model through a partnership between Latino, Hmong, and Somali communities, medical and social service providers, and academic researchers, that creates the necessary prerequisites to facilitate CBPAR on a variety of health topics of mutually identified interests, and ultimately results in relevant research, effective programs, and improved health and wellness of immigrant and refugee communities in St. Paul, Minnesota. The project will develop a model for training and formalized facilitation to support mutually beneficial community-university health research collaborations based on community priorities. The program will train activated community members and prepared researchers who will form partnerships for CBPAR projects;utilize trusted community institutions to direct the training and facilitation processes, and ultimately translate results for use in their agencies;and implement a flexible and dynamic infrastructure to assist in partnership creation and development. The approach will address four barriers to community involvement in the development and implementation of applied research: trust;relevance;cultural appropriateness and uptake. The program's success will be evaluated using group process measures and outcomes including the number of research projects developed and funded. If successful, this approach to partnership building can be disseminated and replicated in other settings. Furthermore, both the model established here and the initial research projects developed through this program will lead to further program development, and applications for future NIH funding. For the Partners in Research initiative, we intend to fulfill three primary aims around generating and evaluating a sustainable CBPAR model:
Aim 1 : Build a process to create activated community members and prepared researchers.
Aim 2 : Utilize current relationships and initiatives to develop the infrastructure that will facilitate collaboration between community and University of Minnesota health researchers.
Aim 3 : Evaluate the success of collaborative research partnerships at developing and implementing projects.
| Allen, Michele L; Culhane-Pera, Kathleen A; Pergament, Shannon et al. (2011) A capacity building program to promote CBPR partnerships between academic researchers and community members. Clin Transl Sci 4:428-33 |
| Culhane-Pera, Kathleen A; Allen, Michele; Pergament, Shannon L et al. (2010) Improving health through community-based participatory action research. Giving immigrants and refugees a voice. Minn Med 93:54-7 |
| Allen, Michele L; Culhane-Pera, Kathleen A; Pergament, Shannon L et al. (2010) Facilitating research faculty participation in CBPR: development of a model based on key informant interviews. Clin Transl Sci 3:233-8 |
