Background This study used Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) to address low participation of racial and ethnic minorities in medical research and the lack of trust between underrepresented communities and researchers. Methods Using a community and academic partnership in July 2012, residents of a South Los Angeles neighborhood were exposed to research recruitment strategies: referral by word-of-mouth, community agencies, direct marketing, and extant study participants. Results Among 258 community members exposed to recruitment strategies, 79.8% completed the study. Exposed individuals identified their most important method for learning about the study as referral by study participants (39.8%), community agencies (30.6%), word-of-mouth (17.5%), or direct marketing promotion (12.1%). Study completion rates varied by recruitment method: referral by community agencies (88.7%), referral by participants (80.4%), direct marketing promotion (86.2%), word of mouth (64.3%). Conclusions Although African American and Latino communities are often described as difficult to engage in research, we found high levels of research participation and completion when recruitment strategies emerged from the community itself. This suggests recruitment strategies based on CPPR principles represent an important opportunity for addressing health disparities and our high rates of research completion should provide optimism and a road map for next steps.

To help maximize the real-world applicability of available interventions in clinical and community healthcare practice, there has been greater emphasis over the last two decades on engaging local communities in health-related research. While there have been numerous successful community-academic partnered collaborations, there continues to be a need to articulate the common barriers experienced during the evolution of these partnerships, and to provide a roadmap for best practices that engage health care providers, patients, families, caregivers, community leaders, healthcare systems, public agencies and academic medical centers. To this end, this article presents a summary of a forum discussion from the 2014 Southern California Dissemination, Implementation and Improvement (DII) Science Symposium, sponsored by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI), University of Southern California (USC) CTSI, and Kaiser Permanente. During this forum, a diverse group of individuals representing multiple constituencies identified four key barriers to success in community-partnered participatory research (CPPR) and discussed consensus recommendations to enhance the development, implementation, and dissemination of community health-related research. In addition, this group identified several ways in which the over 60 NIH funded Clinical and Translational Science Institutes across the country could engage communities and researchers to advance DII science.

Background and Importance: Challenges in healthcare policy and practice have stimulated interest in dissemination and implementation science. The Institute of Medicine Committee on the Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) program recommended expanding the CTSA program's investment and activity in this domain. Guidance is needed to facilitate successful growth of DII science infrastructure, activity and impacts. Objectives: Several CTSAs in Southern California collaborated to identify and respond to local challenges and opportunities to expand dissemination, implementation and improvement research by strengthening capacity and relationships between DII researchers and community, health system, and population health partners. Main outcomes: Planning and outreach by the Southern California CTSAs increased awareness and interest in DII research and generated recommendations for growth. Recommendations include: increasing strong partnerships with healthcare and population health systems to guide policy research agendas and collaborative DII science; promoting multi-sector partnerships that involve researchers and delivery systems throughout DII processes; bringing together multiple disciplines; and addressing national and international barriers as well as opportunities in DII science. Implications: CTSAs through regional collaboration can increase their contributions to improved community health via skill-building, partnership development and enhanced outreach to local healthcare and public health agencies and delivery systems. Clin Trans Sci 2015; Volume 8: 800-806

<p><strong>Objective</strong>: To describe the design and rationale of the Healthy Community Neighborhood Initiative (HCNI), a multicomponent<br />study to understand and document health risk and resources in a<br />low-income and minority community.</p><p><strong>Design</strong>: A community-partnered participatory research project.<br />Setting: A low-income, biethnic African American and Latino neighborhood in South Los Angeles.</p><p><strong>Participants</strong>: Adult community residents aged &gt;18 years.</p><p><strong>Main Outcome Measures</strong>: Household survey and clinical data collection; neighborhood characteristics; neighborhood observations; and community resources asset mapping.</p><p><strong>Results</strong>: We enrolled 206 participants (90% of those eligible), of whom 205 completed the household interview and examination,<br />and 199 provided laboratory samples. Among enrollees, 82 (40%) were aged &gt;50 years and participated in functional status<br />measurement. We completed neighborhood observations on 93 street segments; an average of 2.2 (SD=1.6) study participants<br />resided on each street segment observed. The community asset map identified 290 resources summarized in a Community Resource Guide given to all participants.</p><p><strong>Conclusions</strong>: The HCNI communityacademic partnership has built a framework to assess and document the individual, social, and community factors that may influence clinical and social outcomes in a community at high-risk for preventable chronic disease. Our project suggests that a community collaborative can use<br />culturally and scientifically sound strategies to identify community-centered health and social needs. Additional work is needed to<br />understand strategies for developing and implementing interventions to mitigate these disparities. <em>Ethn Dis</em>. 2016;26(1):123-132; doi:10.18865/ed.26.1.123</p>