Interdisciplinary and Cross-Sector Approaches to Advancing Black Community Health

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The encouraging reports of progress in curbing the obesity epidemic in the US population as a whole are tempered by findings that the favorable trends do not apply equally across racial/ethnic and socioeconomic status. Obesity prevalence continues to increase or remain higher in some ethnic minority and low income population subgroups, including black adults and children. The African American Collaborative Obesity Research Network (AACORN) will host a national workshop with the overarching objective of engaging interdisciplinary groups of scholars as well as stakeholders from diverse societal sectors in the development of a “collective impact” research and research translation agenda to advance black community health. The workshop will be held in August 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The focus will be on strategies that can lead to improvements in black Americans' health outcomes related to diet, physical activity, and body weight. Specific aims are to enable workshop participants to: 1) Integrate insights from multiple academic disciplines, including biomedical sciences, technology, social sciences, public health, arts and humanities; 2) Evaluate the potential utility and applicability of theories, strategies and tools from the fields of business, social policy, public policy, marketing, city planning, and civic engagement; 3) Prioritize pathways for complementary solutions across multiple-sectors, e.g., economics and finance, food systems, education, housing, transportation, planning, and health care, among others; 4) Recognize common themes in successful efforts to create or advocate for changes in environments that influence health behaviors in black American and other high risk populations; and 5) Learn about relevant evaluation measures and tools that fit with multidisciplinary assessment criteria, and involve performance measurement plans. The 2-day workshop, with pre-conference events on the prior afternoon/evening, will involve 80 to 100 participants. The overall objective and aims will be achieved through interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge exchange, person-to-person interactions, and experiential learning, and improving research agendas. Participants will include scholars and established researchers across the career continuum from those in training to established senior scholars. Consistent with the theme, the disciplines, sectors, and areas of practice represented will include, among others, medicine, health care delivery, urban and rural public health, social sciences, marketing, communications, economics, arts/humanities, foods systems, education, child development, city planning, and philanthropy. The format will be highly interactive, drawing on strategies that are suited to the theme and including the use of scenarios as the basis for small group discussions. Evaluation will focus on the quality of the cross sectoral research translation agenda that emerges, as assessed by diverse workshop participants and by post-workshop feedback from selected experts who were not participants. AACORN's cross-sectoral networking with national black organizations will be the main route for dissemination, supported by lay and academic publications.