To ensure that the specific needs and health beliefs of the Latino community are addressed, future research should incorporate community input to create more tailored and effective cancer educational programs for Latinos.

Ethnic minorities who live in socioeconomically disenfranchised communities suffer disproportionately from many health problems including cancer. In an effort to reduce these disparities, many health-care practitioners and scholars have promoted "culturally competent" health education efforts. One component of culturally competent education is a grounded knowledge base. To obtain knowledge about the cancer-related ideas of members of one African American community, researchers conducted focus groups with public housing residents and used the findings to develop a five-part television news series about breast, prostate, and cervix cancers. We found that participants gathered information from the folk, popular, and professional health sectors and constructed their cancer-related ideas from this information. Furthermore, experiences of racism, sexism, and classism colored their beliefs and behaviors regarding the prevention, detection, and treatment of common cancers. For this community "cancer" represents a giant screen upon which individual fears and societal ethnic, political, and economic tensions are projected.

ith the implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA), which was designed to reduce the length of a child's stay in foster care by enforcing strict timeframes for movement to permanency, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which has decreased the number of families receiving welfare assistance, an even larger number of children may enter temporary or permanent care of the public child welfare system or may have additional barriers affecting their departure from care. For example, in studies of the impact of welfare reform on foster care and child welfare, Wells and Guo (2003) and Wells, Guo, and Li (2000) found that a reduction in cash assistance was linked to negative child welfare outcomes and that when single mothers received income from work, their children stayed in custody longer and were more likely to be placed with relatives instead of being reunified with their mothers.Kinship caregivers have become increasingly important in the permanency equation. Unfortunately, there has been little published about policies and practices to promote permanence in kinship homes, particularly kinship adoption. As a result, in 1997 the federal government provided funding opportunities for demonstration projects to inform practice in this area.The Kinship Adoption Project (KAP), on which this article is based in part, was a 3-year joint public-private partnership between the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services, a public child welfare agency, and Bellefaire Jewish Children's Bureau, a private social service agency. KAP comprised two components: (a) an exploratory study aimed at identifying the barriers and facilitators in kinship adoption and (b) a social service program designed to alleviate barriers so that kinship adoption could be achieved. Though the focus of this project was promoting kinship adoption, the voices of kin participants and child welfare practitioners revealed much information about kinship care, including barriers to permanence and what they felt would be helpful by way of supportive services.

The results from these focus groups will inform development of a community-minded cultural competency cancer education training program for medical residents designed to increase screening rates and improve satisfaction with care among Latinos.