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.
Highlights
Given the challenge that these results provided, Project Using New Interventions Together to Eliminate Disparities (UNITED)’s investigators used biographies and the community-based participatory research (CBPR) Speed Dating activity as reminder cues, which were believed to have helped Project UNITED facilitate group formation during a “grant idea” writing retreat with relative ease
Among the four collaborative groups developed through Project UNITED’s CBPR engagement activities, three (75%) completed and successfully submitted a proposal to fund a pilot study addressing obesity related disparities in a rural community
Home Sweet Home is a CBPR project taking place in Greene and Sumter Counties, Alabama. This project was the recipient of Project UNITED and its Community Advisory Board (CAB) internal pilot grant award
Summary
Obesity remains a public health challenge for the US [1], and the US Deep South, as the obesity prevalence of this region is well over 30% [2]. Recent population level estimates suggest that both African American youth and adult women are more likely to be obese compared to their. Cross-sectional annual trends in the US propone that obesity risk is increasing among African American men [3]. Evidence suggest that obesity is associated with increased odds of acquiring co-morbid chronic disease conditions [4], but is associated with poorer quality of life [5] and potentially poses as a significant economic burden for the individual and global economy [6]. Interventions aimed at reducing racial obesity-related disparities may have conferred benefits beyond that of physiological health
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