Abstract B047: Community-academic partners working in a small grants program

Abstract

Abstract Community-based participatory research can help reduce health disparities among underserved populations. The New Mexico State University - Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Partnership for the Advancement of Cancer Research (NMSU – Fred Hutch PACR) aims to reduce cancer health disparities in part through the establishment of community-academic partnerships. The Outreach Core of the PACR has supported a small grants program since 2015 to award funds to competitive community-academic partnership teams addressing regional cancer or health disparities issues through health education. Each year, the Outreach Core staff presents a grant-writing workshop to assist community groups in the development of competitive proposals and to identify academic partners at NMSU. Participants at the grant-writing workshop submit proposals, which are then reviewed by two NMSU faculty researchers. All participants, including the awardees, receive the reviewers’ feedback on their proposal. Over the past four cycles, the grant-writing workshop has trained 60 community members. The top two proposals are funded each year. To date, eight different proposals have been funded, six at $7500 each and two at $5,000 each. All of the funded projects undergo an IRB review at NMSU before the start of the research project. The NMSU academic partners are involved with the community groups through the design, submission of Human Subjects protocol to the IRB, and through data analysis and reporting. Examples of small grant proposals will be presented, including a discussion of how their partnerships worked. This interaction between the community groups and research academics increases the relevance of academic research by assisting the community groups in evaluating their novel educational interventions through robust research projects. Furthermore, these small grant partnerships may serve to provide pilot data for more extensive efforts funded by other agencies. Citation Format: Karoline Sondgeroth, Rebecca Palacios, Graciela A Unguez, Mary O'Connell, Helena B Loest, Kaitlin Englund. Community-academic partners working in a small grants program [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2019 Sep 20-23; San Francisco, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2020;29(6 Suppl_2):Abstract nr B047.