Communities for Wellness Equity: Implementing a Partnered Symposium to Identify Social Determinants of Health Priorities

Background: Social determinants of health (SDoH) affect under-resourced communities. Such communities are seldom involved in defining and prioritizing local SDoH for policy action.

Objectives: Apply community-partnered, participatory research (CPPR) to identify community stakeholder priorities for addressing SDoH in South Los Angeles.

Methods: Over 10 months, CPPR was applied to develop a multi-sector partnership and working group to plan and host a symposium for community stakeholders. 148 individuals and 16 organizations participated and engaged in focus and symposium-wide discussions. Themes were identified through collaborative inductive content analysis.

Results and Lessons Learned: Participants identified ten specific SDoH, such as housing, with structural racism and discrimination as the underlying cause.

Conclusions: Using CPPR to gain community members’ insight about local factors that drive individual and community health is feasible and viewed by the community as socially responsible, suggesting it holds promise to address root causes of health inequality in under-resourced communities.