Community and Academic Partnership: Experience from the Rural Community of the Project CHOICE

The Center for Healthy Options and Innovative Community Empowerment (CHOICE) is a collaborative partnership between, Florida A&M University, Harvard School of Public Health and a rural community of Gadsden County, Florida. This partnership aims to develop and implement strategies for determining the causes of and eliminating health disparities in rural community members. We accomplish these goals by creating community-university partnerships that conduct community-based participatory research, disease prevention, training, and education, foster coalition building among stakeholders that leads to social transformation to improve the health, welfare, and quality of life of community members.

CHOICE has established group membership with sense of belonging, fair participation and open communications by creating group norms of collaborative works. By sharing power in decision making, empowering community for priority setting the project has created productive and mutually trustworthy partnership relationship. An evaluation plan and feedback mechanism was established to identify area of conflict, mechanism of conflict resolution, strengths and weaknesses and to adopt specific strategies for working in diverse partnership.

Administrative, Community Outreach and Information Dissemination, Training, and Research cores and their interactions among and between the universities and the respective communities have been enhanced through Gadsden Community Health Council. The CHOICE partnership has challenged FAMU faculty, researchers and students through applied health disparities research opportunities by exposing limitations and generating creative solutions towards cultural competence and community based practice. To evaluate this partnership we considered Tuchman's model on stages in decision making such as forming, storming, norming and performing.