Citation

Lewis D, Yerby L, Tucker M, Foster PP, Hamilton KC, Fifolt MM, Hites L, Shreves MK, Page SB, Bissell KL, Lucky FL, Higginbotham JC. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2015; 13(1): e13010035.

Affiliation

Department of Community and Rural Medicine, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA. JHIGGIN@cchs.ua.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph13010035

PMID

26703675

Abstract

Cultural competency, trust, and research literacy can affect the planning and implementation of sustainable community-based participatory research (CBPR). The purpose of this manuscript is to highlight: (1) the development of a CBPR pilot grant request for application; and (2) a comprehensive program supporting CBPR obesity-related grant proposals facilitated by activities designed to promote scholarly collaborations between academic researchers and the community. After a competitive application process, academic researchers and non-academic community leaders were selected to participate in activities where the final culminating project was the submission of a collaborative obesity-related CBPR grant application. Teams were comprised of a mix of academic researchers and non-academic community leaders, and each team submitted an application addressing obesity-disparities among rural predominantly African American communities in the US Deep South. Among four collaborative teams, three (75%) successfully submitted a grant application to fund an intervention addressing rural and minority obesity disparities. Among the three submitted grant applications, one was successfully funded by an internal CBPR grant, and another was funded by an institutional seed funding grant. Preliminary findings suggest that the collaborative activities were successful in developing productive scholarly relationships between researchers and community leaders. Future research will seek to understand the full-context of our findings.

Language: en