Engaging the Community in Coalition Efforts to Address Childhood Asthma

Abstract

For health improvement efforts to effectively address community needs, community members must be engaged in planning and implementing public health initiatives. For Allies Against Asthma's coalitions, the community included not only the subpopulation of individuals who suffer disproportionately from asthma but also the individuals and institutions that surround them. Through a quantitative self-assessment survey, informal discussion among coalition leadership, and interviews with key informants, data relevant to community engagement identified a number of important ways the Allies coalitions approached community involvement. Respondents' comments made clear that the way the coalitions conduct their work is often as important as what they do. Across coalitions, factors that were identified as important for community involvement included (a) establishing a commitment to community involvement, (b) building trust, (c) making participation feasible and comfortable, (d) responding to community identified needs, (e) providing leadership development opportunities, and (f) building a shared commitment to desired outcomes.

Connect to Protect Research-Community Partnerships: Assessing Change in Successful Collaboration Factors over Time

“…Examples include asthma (Peterson, Lachance, Butterfoss, Houle, Nicholas, Gilmore, Lara & Friedman, 2006), pregnancy and parenting (Tandon, Parillo, Jenkins, Jenkins & Duggan, 2007), and HIV/AIDS (Ramos, Hernandez, Ferreira-Pinto, Ortiz & Somerville, 2006). Collaborative efforts such as these are often characterized by synergistic unions of varied community sectors including government, faith-based, families, business, and others (e.g., Weiss, Anderson & Lasker, 2002).…”

The state of pediatric asthma in Chicago's Humboldt Park: a community-based study in two local elementary schools

“…An intervention designed to specifically address the factors implicated in this study and tailored to meet the needs of Humboldt Park is a warranted and much needed next step to work in this community. Encouragingly, Humboldt Park residents are engaged in their community and committed to improving asthma among their children, both essential components of successful asthma interventions [45]. Our work suggests that community-academic partnerships in activated communities such as Humboldt Park can result in effective research initiatives and hold promise for successful and sustainable asthma interventions.…”

Content validation of a quantitative stakeholder engagement measure

“…In future work, the authors intend to conduct construct validation of the measure and to examine its psychometric properties. Given the lack of existing measures for stakeholder engagement in research, we will examine correlative validity with measures of CBPR (Arora et al, ), community‐academic partnerships (Bell‐Elkins, ; Kagan et al, ), community participation in research (Khodyakov et al, ), collaboration (Derose, Beatty, & Jackson, ; Mattessich, Murray‐Close, Monsey, & Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, ), coalition engagement (Peterson, ), and partnership assessment (Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health, ; National Collaborating Center for Methods & Tools, ). After the measure has been comprehensively evaluated and implemented in English, there is the potential for translation to other languages.…”