Beyond the Manuscript
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In each volume of the Journal the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript podcast with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners more about their project beyond what went into the final manuscript. The associated editors who handled the article conducted our Beyond the Manuscript interview. This edition of Beyond the Manuscript features Sarah Kastelic and Bonnie Duran, authors of Evaluating Community Based Participatory Research to Improve Community Partnered Science and Community Health. They are interviewed by special guest editor Michelle Proser.
Hello. And on behalf of the guest editors of this particular issue, I just want to say we're pleased to have organized a special issue of Progress in Community Health Partnerships on the science of community engagement. This special issue will stand as a compendium of the latest concepts for developing and assessing the impact of community engagement, provide exemplars of rigorous empirical studies and provide several practical methodological and practical strategies for initiating and strengthening community partnerships. In it, readers will find articles representing different types and states of community academic partnerships illustrating the varieties of current research, priority conditions and priority populations, as well as the diversity of partnerships.
We are pleased to have two authors from one of the articles in this issue. Let's start with a very brief orientation to your research, including its purpose and the current phase of your research progress.
Our project is a four-year mixed methods study funded by the Native American Research Centers for Health Funding Stream, a partnership between the National Institutes of Health and the Indian Health Service. Our work is an in-depth investigation of factors that contribute to and detract from meaningful and effective community/academic partnerships in American Indian and Alaska Native communities, other communities of color and other communities that face health disparities. So our study was funded in 2009. And we are finishing up the third year of work right now.
It sounds like there are quite a few partners involved. Can you tell us who the partners are and how that partnership began?
There are three partners involved. The lead partner is the National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center of which Sarah is one of the founders. And the Center for Participatory Research at the University of New Mexico, headed by Nina Wallerstein. And then at the University of Washington, we have the Indigenous Wellness Research Institute, Center for Indigenous Health Research headed by me, Bonnie Duran.
Going to back to some of the history of the partnership, how did that partnership move from a pilot that you describe in your article to being led by the community entity? [End Page 301]
Well, I'll take that question. We, Nina Wallerstein and I, I was actually at the University of New Mexico. I started my career there. And Nina Wallerstein was one of my most cherished mentors and dearest friends and research partners. We had gotten - Nina, as PI, had gotten some National Institute - actually, at the time it was a National Center for Minority Health and Healthy Disparities. She got some leftover end of year money for three years in a row to really start this investigation. And we, and our wonderful team of predominately American Indian and Latina researchers and other researchers of color at University of New Mexico started this. And we brought in some of the most wonderful advisory board members. You know people like Barbara Israel, and Eugenia Eng and Amy Shultz. Just wonderful CBPR scholars from around the country.
And then this opportunity came up from HIS and NIH for this Native American Research Centers for Health Initiative. We, Nina and I had done NARCH research projects before, but we really wanted to go national in scope to look at the science of CBPR. And we actually got advice from Cheryl Crazybull, who was the president of Northwest Indian College at the time. She was on the board of the PRC, National Congress of American Indians Policy Research Center. And she recommended that we take this idea to Sarah...
