Beyond the Manuscript: Toward Health Equity: A National Study of Promising Practices in Community-Based Participatory Research Bonnie Duran and Hal Strelnick Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’ latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscriptpodcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscriptpost-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscriptprovides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Editor-in-Chief Hal Strelnick interviews Bonnie Duran, one of the authors of “Toward Health Equity: A National Study of Promising Practices in Community-Based Participatory Research.” Your browser does not support the audio tag. Beyond the Manuscript. Click to hear audio Hal Strelnick: Good afternoon and I’m delighted to be speaking with Dr Bonnie Duran. And we’re speaking coast to coast from the Bronx to the Baja, California, Mexico. Bonnie Duran: Cabo San Lucas, actually. Hal Strelnick: Dr Duran is the lead author on an article called “Toward Health Equity: A National Study of Promising Practices in Community-Based Participatory Research.” And I’d like to start the podcast and ask you to describe your own background and how you got involved with this very extensive and comprehensive research project. Bonnie Duran: Sure. Thank you, Hal. Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me to do the podcast; it’s quite an honor. And so I’m a first-generation college student; my parents were not college educated. I come from a mixed-race American Indian background. My father and mother were both from Louisiana, native people, mixed race with other interesting things, African American, Latinx. But I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and I was lucky enough to be a recipient of the wonderful outcomes of the women’s movement, of the civil rights movements. So I went to San Francisco State undergrad, and then after that I actually start meditating. As a native way, I identified and hung around and worked in tribal communities, urban American Indian communities, and tribal communities. But right after college in 1980, I found my way traveling the world as an expatriate. And I learned how to do mindfulness meditation in 1982 before anyone was doing it and before it was the thing, I guess. And doing a lot of meditation it really made me a lot smarter, and I was able to get into UC Berkely, the public health program and working with my brilliant professors, like Dr Mary (Meredith) Minkler and Larry Wallach. I was actually invited to stay for a doctorate, so I was so happy they were so into making sure that there’s a lot of people from multiple social locations trained. They invited me to stay. So I worked as Mary Minkler’s teaching assistant for some of her courses. Community organizing, which I think is a precursor to community-engaged research. So Mary Minkler and I have been working together for a long time, and, of course, Nina Wallerstein I got to know her work working [End Page 353]with Paul Ofraray and looking at photo voice from a Freirean (Paulo) perspective for communities that were suffering oppression and historical trauma and started doing some of that work. And then Nina recruited me to the University of New Mexico, and she and I started working together. And yeah, so I had always needed to work in communities of color and American Indian communities as an academic because I needed to have some place in my life where people looked like me. [Laughs]And as you can imagine back in those days in higher education, there weren’t a lot of people of color, so I just gravitated to doing work in tribal communities. And Nina was doing that too; she was doing a lot of work based on Freirean methodologies and historically marginalized communities as well. And then...