Building Community Capacity in Public Health: The Role of Action-Oriented Partnerships

Abstract

Public health practice increasingly is concerned with the capacity and performance of communities to identify, implement, strengthen, and sustain collective efforts to improve health. The authors developed ways to assist local Turning Point partnerships to improve their community public health system as a secondary outcome of their work on the expressed needs of the community. Using focus groups, meeting minutes, attendance records, and meeting observation, the authors fed information back to the partnerships on systems change. A public health systems improvement plan supportive of local partnerships' work on specific health issues was funded and the collaborative research agenda was further refined.

Using Community-Based Participatory Research to Develop an Intervention to Reduce HIV and STD Infections Among Latino Men

“…Although much of the CBPR literature describes formalized structures for partnership representation and decisionmaking (Israel et al, 2001;Metzler et al, 2003;Veazie et al, 2001;Viswanathan et al, 2004), this CBPR partnership has maintained a fluid structure and informal decision-making process. Most decisions have been made outside of general partnership discussion.…”

Network Analysis as a Tool for Assessing and Building Community Capacity for Provision of Chronic Disease Services

“…n 1998, Goodman and colleagues accelerated an evolving discussion about the definition, importance, and measurement of community capacity, which they defined as the ability of a community "to identify, mobilize and address social and health problems" (Goodman et al, 1998, p. 259), most often through collaboration. Building on this general theme, in recent years community readiness (Edwards, Jumper-Thurman, Plested, Oetting, & Swanson, 2000), community activation (Wickizer et al, 1993), community motivation (Hallman & Wandersman, 1992), community empowerment (Rappaport, 1987), community competence (Eng & Parker, 1994), and systems change (Veazie et al, 2001) have all been discussed as concepts that are closely related to community capacity and its implementation in public health practice. Capacity is also typically viewed as transferable across health issues (Chaskin, Brown, Venkatesh, & Vidal, 2001).…”

Public-Academic Partnerships: Improving Care for Older Persons With Schizophrenia Through an Academic-Community Partnership

“…Public-academic partnerships combine two different organizational systems, each with its own values, styles, and limitations. The collaborative process model we employed to develop the organization and function of the partnership between the Geriatric Psychiatry Research Center and AOAMHS consists of five steps: building and sustaining the partnership, mobilizing community support and enhancing infrastructure for community research capacity, knowledge generation (research and training), knowledge transfer to community practice (dissemination and implementation), and evaluation of the outcomes and process (7,8). Applying the core principles of communitybased participatory research and cultural exchange theory to the collaborative process model, we undertook the formation of an academic-public partnership.…”