Community Board Members Research Articles

Understanding community- and system-capacity change over time: A close look at changing social capital in Evidence2Success communities.

Evidence in majority White and low-population areas suggest that community prevention systems can create social capital that is needed to support high-quality implementation and sustainability of evidence-based programs. This study expands prior work by asking the question: How does community social capital change during the implementation of a community prevention system in low-income, highly populated communities of color?Data were collected from Community Board members and Key Leaders in five communities. Linear mixed effect models analyzed data on reports of social capital over time, first as reported by Community Board members then by Key Leaders.Community Board members reported social capital improved significantly over time during the implementation of the Evidence2Success framework. Key Leader reports did not change significantly over time.These findings suggest that community prevention systems implemented in historically marginalized communities may help communities build social capital that is likely to support the dissemination and sustainability of evidence-based programs.

Community Perceptions in New York City: Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Policies and Programs in the First 1000 Days

ObjectivesTo examine perceptions of Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) policies and programs focused on the first 1000 days—gestation through age 2 years—among community stakeholders in Washington Heights and the South Bronx, two neighborhoods in New York City with disproportionately high prevalence of childhood obesity.MethodsA multilevel framework informed interview guide development. Using purposeful sampling, we recruited study participants who were (1) able to speak English or Spanish and (2) resided or employed in Washington Heights or the South Bronx. Participants included community leaders (local government officials, community board members, and employees from community- and faith-based organizations) as well as community members. Trained research staff conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews. Using immersion/crystallization and template style coding, the study team performed thematic analysis until no new relevant themes emerged.ResultsAmong the 19 female study participants, perceived facilitators to SSB policy and program implementation included sustained partnerships with broad coalitions; continual education and clear messaging; and increased accessibility to healthier beverages. Perceived barriers included systems-level challenges accessing programs that support healthy beverage options, and individual-level lack of access to affordable healthy beverages. Acceptable potential intervention strategies included messaging that emphasizes health in pregnancy and infancy; policies that require healthy beverages as the default option in restaurants; and policies that remove SSBs from childcare settings. Some strongly favored SSB excise taxes while others opposed them, but all participants supported reinvestment of SSB tax revenue into health resources among marginalized communities.ConclusionsA multi-pronged approach that incorporates engagement, access, equitable reinvestment of revenue, and continual clear messaging may facilitate implementation of policies and programs to reduce SSB consumption in the first 1000 days.

30718 Evaluating and advancing the CTSA external advisory board: Best practices

ABSTRACT IMPACT: The goal of this evaluation study is to enhance the ability of the External Review Board to advise the CTSA at UTMB how to improve translational science activities. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the work of the External Review Board (EAB) for the Institute for Translational Sciences/CTSA at the University of Texas Medical Branch-Galveston. This evaluation is conducted through the perceptions of professional and community board members. The outcome consists of an inventory of best practices. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We collected data by means of semi-structured interviews with all eight member of the EAB. The interviews were conducted via telephone, lasted approximately 30 minutes each, and were audio-recorded with respondents’ permission. Respondents’ identities were held in confidence. The IRB at UTMB reviewed our study. The interviews were transcribed. The data were analyzed by means of an inductively-oriented, grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006). Emergent themes led to the formation of a series of best practices. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Common concerns included the need for more extensive training for new members; circulation of the agenda before the meeting; and the value of more structured main leadership. The members generally agreed that the breakout groups were valuable because they encouraged them to engage in hands-on responses to practical problems. One of the key epistemological findings was the consensus view that the evaluation of the EAB should be an ongoing project, as opposed to a yearly task. This serious approach to evaluation would be conducive to a process analysis of the EAB, since medical, social, economic, and cultural conditions surrounding and influencing translational science are generally in flux (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic and the various stages in the CTSA grant). Overall, the EAB experience was quite positive for them. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: The strongest sentiment expressed in the interviews was that the CTSA at UTMB should focus and build on its strength--the science of team science--as opposed to any concerted search for weaknesses that the term “evaluation” occasionally implies.

Effect of Corporate Governance on Sustainability Disclosures: Evidence from Turkey

This study aims to examine the relationship between the corporate governance structure and sustainability disclosure in Turkish business. To measure the impact of the board of directors on sustainability disclosure, companies on the Istanbul Stock Exchange that prepared sustainability reports per the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) were selected as the working sample. In this study, 68 fiscal year data sets of 17 businesses that published regular sustainability reports during 2013–2016 were used. All were audited by the GRI. During the analysis, it was observed that the presence of influential community board members and the profitability of the enterprises are factors that bear positive effects on sustainability disclosures. Board size, the presence of independent board members, and the existence of corporate social responsibility committees were negative factors that, in fact, reduced sustainability disclosures of the companies. To increase sustainability disclosures, this study suggests that boards of directors should consist of influential community leaders.

Decentralized delivery of financial education: Experimental evidence from Rwanda

We implement a large-scale field experiment with 200 Savings and Credit Cooperative Associations (SACCOs) in Rwanda, and test competing models of local financial education delivery. One-third of SACCOs were invited to a comprehensive training-of-trainers (TOT) workshop and stipulated to send the SACCO manager, a loan officer, and a community board member to be trained. Another one-third were allowed free selection of trainers, which resulted in greater community representation and lower loan officer involvement at the TOT and higher attendance rates at the beneficiary trainings. We find no improvements in financial practices or behavior among the fixed selection group, but statistically significant and larger improvements in financial planning, rules of thumb, and savings deposits among the autonomous selection group. Qualitative fieldwork to understand mechanisms underscores the importance of community-led delivery of the financial education program.

Horizons Community Board Collection: Biosensors

A themed collection on biosensing, guest edited by Nanoscale Horizons Community Board members Zhiyuan Liu and Arun Richard Chandrasekaran and Materials Horizons Community Board member Gift Mehlana.

Food for Thought: The Path to Food Security in Newark, NJ

Mostly filmed by youth, Food for Thought is a documentary film that dissects the state of food security and access to healthy foods in Newark, New Jersey, one of the U.S's largest “food deserts”. Newark was voted the most stressed city in America 2017 based in part on high rates of obesity and diabetes, both diseases associated with the systemic issue of food insecurity. In response, RWJBarnabas Health and the Greater Newark Community Advisory Board, spearheaded the “Food for Thought” research initiative, that draws on community‐based assets and solutions to address food insecurity. The film features interviews with community activists, urban farmers, public health experts, city officials, and local youth ambassadors, all from within the community. Using participatory design research methodologies, twenty‐five youth were trained to use their camera phones as citizen journalists. The youth and community board members were then a part of the process of synthesizing the data (in the editing process), and lastly, after the film was completed, community members facilitated discussions within the community to further the research outcomes.

Horizons Community Board Collection – Progress and Development in Advanced Energy Storage Technologies

A themed collection on progress and development in advance energy storage technologies, guest edited by Materials Horizons Community Board members Vipin Kumar and Kai Zhang.

Horizons Community Board collection – emerging 2D materials for energy and electronics applications

A themed collection on emerging 2D materials for energy and electronics applications, guest edited by Nanoscale Horizons Community Board member Li Li, and Materials Horizons Community Board members Tianyi Ma and Nan Zhang.

Horizons Community Board Collection – Nanobiomedicine

A themed collection on nanobiomedicine, guest edited by Nanoscale Horizons Community Board Member Chandra Kumar Dixit and Materials Horizons Community Board Member Christopher M. Proctor.

Horizons Community Board collection – emerging 2D materials for energy and electronics applications

A themed collection on emerging 2D materials for energy and electronics applications, guest edited by Nanoscale Horizons Community Board member Li Li, and Materials Horizons Community Board members Tianyi Ma and Nan Zhang.

Applying systems thinking models of organizational design and change in community operational research

In this article, we present a systems thinking approach to organizational design and change called VMCL (vision, mission, culture/capacity, learning) and describe different community applications to illustrate its theoretical and practical relevance to community operational research (Community OR). VMCL was developed to apply systems thinking and complexity theory to any situation that involves groups of people, such as organizations. Additionally, we elaborate a network-based theory of change called NFST (naysayers, fence-sitters, supporters, thought leaders) for implementing VMCL in any community context. We describe how VMCL was extensively applied to local grassroots movements involving community members, students, staff, teachers, school leaders, and board members to change US school districts. We then discuss the relevance and application of VMCL and NFST to community mobilization by a grassroots movement in Wisconsin, USA. We conclude by discussing the ways in which VMCL and NFST foster systemic Community OR, and how they are useful tools for community organizers and other practitioners.

Visions of resilience: lessons from applying a digital democracy tool in New York’s Jamaica Bay watershed

Resilience to extreme weather events and other sudden changes is an issue facing many communities in the early twenty-first century. Planning to respond to disasters is particularly complicated in densely inhabited, multi-jurisdictional urban social-ecological systems like the watershed of Jamaica Bay, a large urbanized estuary on the south side of New York City. This area contains parklands managed by New York City, the National Park Service, and other agencies, four sewage treatment plants, three former landfills, and urban and suburban communities, all of which were heavily impacted by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Here successful resilience planning and response requires participation from a wide variety of government and civil society players each with different types of knowledge, value systems, and expectations about what resilience means. To investigate how “visions” of future resilience differed among several communities living in or concerned with Jamaica Bay, New York, we deployed a free, Internet-based modeling framework called Visionmaker that enabled interactive scenario creation and testing. Through a series of standardized workshops, we recruited participants from a variety of different communities of practice (i.e. researchers, land managers, educators, non-governmental organization staff, and community board members) to design “visions of resilience”. Visions spanned terrestrial and marine environments and contained natural and built ecosystems. Most users favored increasing resilience through expanding salt marsh and green infrastructure while, for the most part, keeping the built city landscape of streets and buildings intact. We compare and contrast these visions and discuss the implications for future resilience planning in coastal cities.

Factors Limiting Formation of Community Forestry Enterprises in the Southern Mixteca Region of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Many studies have considered community-based forestry enterprises to be the best option for development of rural Mexican communities with forests. While some of Mexico's rural communities with forests receive significant economic and social benefits from having a community forestry enterprise, the majority have not formed such enterprises. The purpose of this article is to identify and describe factors limiting the formation of community forestry enterprise in rural communities with temperate forests in the Southern Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. The study involved fieldwork, surveys applied to Community Board members, and maps developed from satellite images in order to calculate the forested surface area. It was found that the majority of Southern Mixteca communities lack the natural and social conditions necessary for developing community forestry enterprise; in this region, commercial forestry is limited due to insufficient precipitation, scarcity of land or timber species, community members' wariness of commercial timber extraction projects, ineffective local governance, lack of capital, and certain cultural beliefs. Only three of the 25 communities surveyed have a community forestry enterprise; however, several communities have developed other ways of profiting from their forests, including pine resin extraction, payment for environmental services (PES), sale of spring water, and ecotourism. We conclude that community forestry enterprise are not the only option for rural communities to generate income from their forests; in recent years a variety of forest-related economic opportunities have arisen which are less demanding of communities' physical and social resources.

"A place at the table:" a qualitative analysis of community board members' experiences with academic HIV/AIDS research.

BackgroundCommunity advisory boards (CAB) are proposed as one mechanism to carry out successful community based participatory research (CBPR), but the presence of CABs may be insufficient to optimize academic-community partnerships.MethodsWe conducted semi-structured interviews with minority members of a CAB partnered with a HIV/AIDS research center and identified three themes.ResultsFirst, lack of trust in researchers included two subthemes: researchers’ lacked respect for community-based organizations’ (CBO’s) interests and paid inadequate attention to building trust. Second, power imbalance included three subthemes: CAB members felt like inferior “token” members, felt that a lack of communication led to disempowerment, and held preconceived beliefs of researchers that led to perceived power imbalance. Third, CAB members suggested best practices, including using collaborations to build trust, actively allocating power, and sharing tangible research benefits with CBOs.ConclusionsOur findings indicate that CABs must be founded on trust and instilled with power to meet the tenets of CBPR.

Health literacy in relation to cancer: addressing the silence about and absence of cancer discussion among Aboriginal people, communities and health services.

Cancer outcomes for Aboriginal Australians are poorer when compared with cancer outcomes for non-Aboriginal Australians despite overall improvements in cancer outcomes. One concept used to examine inequities in health outcomes between groups is health literacy. Recent research and advocacy have pointed to the importance of increasing health literacy as it relates to cancer among Aboriginal people. This study examined individual, social and cultural aspects of health literacy relevant to cancer among Aboriginal patients, carers and their health workers in New South Wales. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 22 Aboriginal people who had been diagnosed with cancer, 18 people who were carers of Aboriginal people with cancer and 16 healthcare workers (eight Aboriginal and eight non-Aboriginal health workers). Awareness, knowledge and experience of cancer were largely absent from people's lives and experiences until they were diagnosed, illustrating the need for cancer awareness raising among Aboriginal people, communities and services. Some beliefs about cancer (particularly equating cancer to death) differed from mainstream Western biomedical views of the body and cancer and this served to silence discussion on cancer. As such, these beliefs can be used to inform communication and help illuminate how beliefs can shape responses to cancer. Participants proposed some practical strategies that could work to fill absences in knowledge and build on beliefs about cancer. These results were characterised by a silence about cancer, an absence of discussions of cancer and an acknowledgement of an already full health agenda for Aboriginal communities. To promote health literacy in relation to cancer would require a multi-layered programme of work involving grass-roots community education, workers and Board members of Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations and speciality cancer services, with a particular focus on programmes to bridge community-based primary care and tertiary level cancer services.

Harnessing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Enable Community-Oriented Primary Care

Background: Despite growing acceptance and implementation of geographic information systems (GIS) in the public health arena, its utility for clinical population management and coordination by leaders in a primary care clinical health setting has been neither fully realized nor evaluated. Methods: In a primary care network of clinics charged with caring for vulnerable urban communities, we used GIS to (1) integrate and analyze clinical (practice management) data and population (census) data and (2) generate distribution, service area, and population penetration maps of those clinics. We then conducted qualitative evaluations of the responses of primary care clinic leaders, administrators, and community board members to analytic mapping of their clinic and regional population data. Results: Practice management data were extracted, geocoded, and mapped to reveal variation between actual clinical service areas and the medically underserved areas for which these clinics received funding, which was surprising to center leaders. In addition, population penetration analyses were performed to depict patterns of utilization. Qualitative assessments of staff response to the process of mapping clinical and population data revealed enthusiastic engagement in the process, which led to enhanced community comprehension, new ideas about data use, and an array of applications to improve their clinical revenue. However, they also revealed barriers to further adoption, including time, expense, and technical expertise, which could limit the use of GIS and mapping unless economies of scale across clinics, the use of web technology, and the availability of dynamic mapping tools could be realized. Conclusions: Analytic mapping was enthusiastically received and practically applied in the primary care setting, and was readily comprehended by clinic leaders for innovative purposes. This is a tool of particular relevance amid primary care safety-net expansion and increased funding of health information technology diffusion in these settings, particularly if the hurdles of cost and technological expertise are overcome by harnessing new advances in web-based mapping technology.

Building budgets and trust through the alchemy of superintendent leadership

Superintendents have the burden and the opportunity to exert leadership through the budget-building process. This article details a dozen tenets which can be implemented by practicing superintendents. Doing so increases the chances of building trust among the stakeholders of administrators, staff, community, and school board members. The district superintendent of schools occupies the only positional office in the organization capable of orchestrating this process.

Harnessing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Enable Community-Oriented Primary Care

Despite growing acceptance and implementation of geographic information systems (GIS) in the public health arena, its utility for clinical population management and coordination by leaders in a primary care clinical health setting has been neither fully realized nor evaluated. In a primary care network of clinics charged with caring for vulnerable urban communities, we used GIS to (1) integrate and analyze clinical (practice management) data and population (census) data and (2) generate distribution, service area, and population penetration maps of those clinics. We then conducted qualitative evaluation of the responses of primary care clinic leaders, administrators, and community board members to analytic mapping of their clinic and regional population data. Practice management data were extracted, geocoded, and mapped to reveal variation between actual clinical service areas and the medically underserved areas for which these clinics received funding, which was surprising to center leaders. In addition, population penetration analyses were performed to depict patterns of utilization. Qualitative assessments of staff response to the process of mapping clinical and population data revealed enthusiastic engagement in the process, which led to enhanced community comprehension, new ideas about data use, and an array of applications to improve their clinical revenue. However, they also revealed barriers to further adoption, including time, expense, and technical expertise, which could limit the use of GIS and mapping unless economies of scale across clinics, the use of web technology, and the availability of dynamic mapping tools could be realized. Analytic mapping was enthusiastically received and practically applied in the primary care setting, and was readily comprehended by clinic leaders for innovative purposes. This is a tool of particular relevance amid primary care safety-net expansion and increased funding of health information technology diffusion in these settings, particularly if the hurdles of cost and technological expertise are overcome by harnessing new advances in web-based mapping technology.

Voices from the Community

Summary When community members are allowed to participate in the planning and implementation process of a program, they are empowering themselves and their community. The CHAMP Family Program uses a collaborative programming approach with a focus on building the capacities of community members to deliver a family-based HIV prevention program. The CHAMP Program has a Collaborative Board that oversees all aspects of the research project. Using an empowerment framework, this article explores Community Board members' perspectives on their experience in working on CHAMP. Recommendations to researchers in the form of ten key ingredients for community collaboration are presented. The key points primarily focus on building trust with the community, recognizing community strengths, developing skills, building intragroup relations, and involving the community as partners from the beginning to the end.