Engagement is one of the core components of our proposed Carolina-Shaw Comprehensive NCMHD Research Center, designed to link research, dissemination, and innovation with the assets and needs of African-American communities in North Carolina. The goal of this Core is to define the components of organizational readiness in black churches that are associated with successfully engaging African-American communities and individuals in the research process to address health disparities. This proposed Core is unique in that the research questions and study design are borne out of close working relationships and expertise in partnering with minority communities that were stimulated and strengthened by the existing Carolina-Shaw Partnership to Eliminate Health Disparities, often referred to as Project EXPORT. The Community Engagement Core formalizes the working group developed by our Tri-Core, a five-year EXPORT partnership of the Community Outreach Core at Shaw University, the Minority Recruitment Core/Project Connect at UNC's School of Medicine, and the CBPR Core at UNC School of Public Health. The proposed activities of the Community Engagement Core extend the work of the pilot project on measurement of black churches' readiness for change (see Research Core). The activities also build on the infrastructure and relationships from our initial Project EXPORT award, the infrastructure of the DC2 church network, and from Project Connect, a registry of individuals who are interested in participating in health disparities research. With this foundation we will apply theory from organization science to inform the proposed investigations. The conceptual model guiding this investigation posits that engagement of African-American communities in health disparities research at both an organizational and individual level is a function of 1) the black church's organizational readiness for change. 2) the quality of the implementation policies and practices that the church puts into place, 3) the church's organizational climate for implementing change, and 4) the congregation members' individual readiness for change that results from these policies and practices. Implicit in this model is the idea that community engagement has multiple levels, where organizational and individual readiness to engage in research is associated in a unique manner in the African-American community, and the black church plays a pivotal role.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 37 publications
