Podcast Interview Transcript Lee Bone, Jamie Zoellner, and Demetric Warren In each volume of Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript, podcast interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides authors with the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. Beyond the Manuscript podcasts are available for download on the journal's website (http://www.press-dev.jhu.edu/journals/progress_in_community_health_partnerships/multimedia.html). This Beyond the Manuscript podcast is with Jamie Zoellner, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Food Systems at the University of Southern Mississippi, lead author of Fit for Life Steps, Results of a Community Walking Intervention in the Rural Mississippi Delta, and Demetric Warren, staff member of the Hollandale Lower Mississippi Delta Nutrition Intervention Research Initiation, who contributed to the study project. Lee Bone, Associate Editor, and Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, conducted the interview. The following is an edited transcript of the Beyond the Manuscript podcast. * * * Lee Bone: Thank all of you for taking the time to conduct this interview. We're interested in learning more about the Partnership and the steps that you have, or are taking to continue this Partnership and the research. We would like to give you the opportunity to discuss anything you may have wanted to include in the manuscript but didn't have the opportunity because of word limitations. So, in this paper you indicate, as many do, that CBPR takes a lot of time, and that that is obviously a frequent observation. We want to know more about that and so we'd like to pose some questions to you. Our ultimate goal is to better understand how we might be more efficient, if that's a proper word, in our partnership research. Jamie Zoellner: I think that's a really good question as far as the whole efficiency issue. I'm not sure that the whole CBPR process really can or should be rushed. I think truly in any situation where you're trying to build a relationship it takes a while for those partners involved to really connect, and to understand if they want to be a part of that partnership. It did take up a lot of time to nurture the relationship, and to build the trust, and yet it was at least two years in that process just with this particular intervention. I think some of the things to consider are that in our particular situation the people that were a part of our community panel were volunteers. So we had to be cautious about how much of their time to request in preparing for meetings, and concerning other obligations they had outside of their commitment to our partnership. For the researchers, as well, this was one of many projects that they had going on. So I think trying to balance all of that was a challenge and did run into some efficiency issues with trying to get the project to move along a little more quickly. I can say that now that we've gone through this first intervention, we feel much more optimistic about the timelines for our future interventions. So, we're hoping to take what we've learned and just move forward with it much more quickly now that that relationship has been formed. [End Page 61] Lee Bone: So given the complexity of building these partnerships and the demands on people and being sensitive to those, what kinds of ways did people prepare themselves for meetings, and get people on the committee to deliver on tasks? Did you have a chairperson, for example? Jamie Zoellner: Demetric was really a part of practically every one of those meetings. Demetric, do you want to answer that question? Demetric Warren: Sure. The meetings that we conducted with the partnership that we formed were with the university and the community. We set up different committees to handle different aspects of the intervention. Also, with the chairpersons and other persons put in charge of the committees, the job was primarily to oversee the functions...