Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #105848

Meredith Minkler, DrPH and Victoria Breckwich Vasquez, DrPH, MPH. School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, 140 Earl Warren Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-7360, 510 642-4397, mink@uclink4.berkeley.edu

Community based participatory research (CBPR), emphasizing community-driven issue selection and collaborative participation in data collection, interpretation, and use of findings to promote social change, is ideally suited to furthering a progressive public health agenda. This paper will examine the "evidence base" for the impacts of community based participatory research (CBPR) on environmental justice policy, drawing on the results of a recent national study. Four prominent environmental justice case studies will be used to illustrate the dilemmas and challenges that hamper efforts to document CBPR's contributions to regional and statewide policy changes. These challenges include: NIH and other government and foundation funding restrictions precluding efforts to "influence policy" and thereby suppressing discussion of such efforts; differential comfort levels and/or familarity with the language of policy and policy advocacy; the difficulty teasing apart CBPR project contributions from larger sociopolitical and other contextual factors; and the frequent need for community-researcher partners to "give credit" to politicians and other key stakeholders, downplaying in the process the partnership's own contributions in impacting on the policy level. Case studies from Harlem, NY, Tillery, NC, Los Angeles, CA and the tribal communities of Oklahoma and New Mexico will be used to illustrate these and other dilemmas, as well as the potency of CBPR as an approach to community-driven research for social change, including progressive policy level change.

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