Podcast Interview Transcript
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Podcast Interview Transcript
Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships' latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides 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 Darius Tandon interviews Deborah John, author, and Liana Harden, Extension community health partner in "Community-Engaged Attribute Mapping: Exploring Resources and Readiness to Change the Rural Context for Obesity Prevention."
Well, good afternoon. We are doing a Beyond the Manuscript, and I have a few questions for two of the authors of our manuscript. And after I ask the first question, I'll ask the authors to introduce themselves as they are responding to my question. So, my first question is that this is a project that included six western states in the US reaching about 600 rural stakeholders, and the land grant university extension is recognized for engaging constituents in health partnerships within the communities that they served. Could you speak a little bit more about the level of coordination, organizing, communication among the partner sites, and, also, what were the opportunities for partners to dialogue across communities and states and are there any lessons learned on that communication that you would like to share?
My name is Deborah, and I was the project director for this project, and one of the important aspects is that extension state leadership and community teams were critical for coordinating across the land grant university system and the associated extensions. And they function quite differently from state to state. The cooperative extension system as a public system is supported by national, state, and local cooperative agreements. And this opportunity enabled us to engage with extension as a critical community health partner and that's a strength because of the national system, which is emerging now with a focus on population health. At the local level, I think Liana has some examples that might actually clarify how we engaged at the local level with extension as a community partner with community organizations.
Yeah. So, my name is Liana Harden. I was a faculty research assistant on the program with Deborah on the research. So, I helped her implement that research on the ground. It was a really fantastic experience. Specifically speaking to this question, I think what were really some things that really popped out to me about this effort of coordinating between not only our community partners within the organizations within the community and the other extension offices in other counties is that we were able to share successful strategies and ideas for engagement as we were moving through. So, it provided us this constant process [End Page 197]evaluation as a result and developing our work as we learned together. And watching the incredible work unfold together was really impactful and, so, we could really learn from each other and apply the things that we knew were working. And then we could avoid those things that were really challenging and didn't – weren't efficient or effective. So, I found it to be really rewarding working together and keeping that constant communication open.
And could I actually prompt Liana–
Yeah.
–a little bit to talk about – so, Liana and our place-based extension partners are actually located in and embedded in the communities that they serve through their cooperative extension local offices. And, as a place-based partner, in the role of the community-based health partner, extension is an interface between the communities that are served by extension and engaging those communities so that we have meaningful dialogue from the community to extension, from extension to the...
