Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes sharing the Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR) in Wyoming reportedly die 30 years earlier than whites in the state. We analyzed data on the health status of 176 adults from 96 families who participated in a randomized controlled trial to assess health effects of home gardens. Measures of body mass index, waist circumference, blood pressure, hemoglobin A1c, vitamin D, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and household food security were collected from participating adults before the intervention. Results indicated that this group has considerably worse health status than average US adults and also fares worse than average American Indians/Alaska Natives. To help improve these disparities, Native Americans need access to appropriate and effective means of health promotion.

A guiding principle in participatory action research collaborations is to strive for equity in relations between community and academic project partners. One promising way of assessing equity and power sharing in such partnerships is to trace and analyze financial resource allocation within them. This paper reports and assesses how nearly US$5 million in grant funding was allocated and spent between community and academic partners in a research, extension, and education project called Food Dignity in the United States. Findings from this analysis of extensive financial project records include that 36% of the funding was subawarded to the five community-based organization (CBO) partners, 40% supported the work of two university partners, and the remaining 24% was invested in developing and supporting the collaboration of many diverse partners on a wide range of project goals. Staff salary and fringe composed the single largest spending arena, making up about two-thirds of spending for CBOs and collaboration, and half for universities. However, had faculty salaries been paid from the grant, rather than by the partnering universities, then this component would have been FoodDignity

IntroductionThis community-based participatory research,Growing Resilience,will be the first full-scale randomised controlled trial we have identified that is designed to evaluate impacts of home gardening on family health. It is based on observational studies suggesting home food gardening has myriad health benefits, Wind River Indian Reservation (WRIR) families’ interest in home gardening and the need to end Native American health disparities with empowering, appropriate and effective health interventions.Methods and analysisA total of 100 Native American families in WRIR who have not gardened recently but want to garden will be randomly allocated (1:1) to intervention (receiving 2 years of support designing, installing and maintaining a home food garden of at least 80 square feet (approximately 7 square meters) or to delayed-intervention control (receiving same gardening support after 2 years of data collection). Willing family members aged 5 and up will participate in data collection each February and August for 2 years, with blood, biometric and survey measures at each. The primary outcome is adult body mass index (BMI). Secondary outcomes include child BMI, and adult hand strength, self-reported physical and mental health, diabetes control and food security. Primary analysis will be intention to treat (ITT), using univariate and bivariate descriptive statistics followed by a mixed model to estimate the ITT effect of the intervention using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) estimation. We will also examine treatment affects using a gardening fidelity measure, combined adult and child BMI outcomes using a lambda mu and sigma (LMS) Z-score reference data set and possible mechanisms of health impacts.Ethics and disseminationThis protocol was approved by the University of Wyoming Institutional Review Board (IRB) and the project’s Community Advisory Board. De-identified data will be shared with each tribe, and results will be published in peer-reviewed journals, summarised for distribution in WRIR, and shared at a national event to be hosted in WRIR in 2020.Trial registration numberNCT02672748; Pre-results.

This article is a personal account of working as an administrator and research scientist on a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project called Food Dignity. It describes how the community partners on the project taught the author about privilege and oppression in campus–community research partnerships. It describes her initial failures to acknowledge privilege and actively work to overcome oppression via acts of 'passive oppression' and suggests that acts of passive oppression produce and reproduce structural oppression. The article goes on to give specific examples of structural oppression in CBPR relationships and proposes ways that people in project coordination and administration roles can help circumvent or overcome them. It concludes by acknowledging the author's place of privilege as an academic in Food Dignity, and by re-envisioning her role within the project as a 'co-passionate navigator'. It examines the importance of co-passionate navigators in CBPR and describes their role in changing the campus–community research landscape, making CBPR partnerships more just and equitable for all partners.