Maximizing Immigrant and Refugee Health: A community-partnered approach

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Research Objectives for Westside Community Health Services (WSCHS) WSCHS will have primary responsibility for the aims that involve training activated community scholars and facilitating their meetings with the prepared researchers. These include the following: Aim 1: Build a process to create activated community members and prepared researchers. Aim 1a. Promotion of Activated Community (Training Activated Community (TAC) Scholars) Latino, Hmong, and Somali community representatives who have a need/interest in having questions regarding their community's health answered will be recruited to participate in the program. The goal is to create a small cadre of activated community scholars who can generate health-related research questions of importance to their community or community organizations, clearly articulate their interpretation of their communities' interests and needs, and work effectively with researchers to generate research projects that can provider answers to their questions. The PMT will develop criteria to identify nine individuals (three from each community) to be TAC Scholars. Leaders in ethnic community organizations will nominate people to be TAC scholars and nine will be recruited from the nominees. These individuals may be involved in community organizations, religious institutions, or businesses, or may be community activists without specific affiliations. While the participants will not be required to have a research question identified at the start of the program, they will be asked to have an area of interest, and be open to participating in research. Furthermore, they must be proficient in English, knowledgeable about their community, and be willing and committed to the twoyear program. We anticipate that participants will benefit from a multiethnic group; they will learn about group process in a multicultural environment; learn about successes and challenges in health issues from other refugee and immigrant groups; and may create cross-community partnerships. The project management team will draft a preliminary curriculum to engage the nine participants around principles of CBPAR. Semi-structured interviews will be initiated with all TAC Scholars prior to the training sessions to assess perceptions of research, experiences with research, and priority areas for didactic training. This information will be used to further refine the curriculum ensuring that the final approach is flexible to accommodate participants' initial goals, evolving needs, and developing areas of research interest. As an initial exercise participants will work as a group to establish rules and guidelines for group process that all participants will be asked to adhere to, including participation, attendance, a mission statement and core goals for the experience. The group will meet twice a month for three months for didactic and experiential classes presented by the project management team, UMN researchers (on topics requested by TAC Scholars), and other community members. Didactic and experiential topics will include: a review of/and exercise in accessing health statistics regarding immigrant and refugee communities, priority setting, research and the research enterprise, a group dynamic processes (shared leadership, communication strategies, conflict resolution, cooperative planning) and other topics of interest identified by TAC Scholars in the initial goal-setting sessions. As is consistent with the CBPAR process,36 each session will conclude with a discussion regarding the success of the session both in terms of TAC Scholar comfort in participation and in the success at meeting the session objectives. Barriers to achieving full participation and meeting objectives will be documented by the note taker and leaders will attempt to address these concerns prior to the next meeting. The goals of these discussions are to first to exemplify how discussions regarding group process are important to meeting collaborative goals and train TAC Scholars in these techniques and second to allow the leaders to improve the curriculum to better meet the participant's needs. Participants will complete a number of research tasks that develop skills often utilized in CBPAR. These will include defining how their goals can be restated as semistructured interview questions that will be utilized to evaluate successful curriculum development and implementation at the end of the didactic sessions. Additional exercises will include performing three to four key informant interviews with leaders or other interested individuals in their community to gather broader data on community opinion on their research area. Once their research topic is identified, they will work with instructors to refine the idea into a statement of assets and need that can be used as the basis for discussion during the next phases of the project where they identify a University-based research partner.