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

Abstract #111568

Kimberly D. Campbell-Voytal, PhD, RN, Department of Community Medicine, Wayne State University School of Medicine, 4201 St. Antoine Blvd., 9D-UHC, Detroit, MI 48201 and Mary B. Cocanougher, Executive Director, Northwest Neighborhood Health Empowement Center, 10500 Lyndon Street, Detroit, MI 48238, 313 310-5471, mcocanougher2003@yahoo.com.

Consistent with the concept of communities as ‘agents of change' who create and lead ‘units of solution', the Northwest Neighborhood Health Empowerment Center was created by its medically underserved community to improve access to health services. Since 1998 this citizen-led model of health promotion has provided community awareness, screening, education, support and referral services tailored to local needs. To accomplish this work the Center depends on an complex web of partnerships to provide in-kind resources. These relationships, however, impose obligations that can threaten the Center's identity, independence, and ultimate survival. As part of a larger ethnographic study of the Center, the Executive Director and academic partner engaged in a series of exploratory discussions regarding knowledge-production and power. As cultural translators each partner taught the other how knowledge was linked to power in their respective domains. Together they mapped the dynamics of power in the Center and how self-knowledge was transformed through cycles of formative, evaluative, and translational research. Four themes emerged in the analysis of the Center's ability to control knowledge production: 1)“Recognizing you know what you know (politics of identity)”, 2) “Training your partners” (avoiding co-optation), 3) “Proving you are not a paper-program” (claiming knowledge-power), 4) “Making science work for us” (leveraging knowledge-power). The ethical challenges to community and academic partners are discussed. The community's perspective on how to minimize co-optation and maximize community power is emphasized. This ethnographic study reaffirms that community capacity to “speak back” to science is essential if community benefit is to be achieved.

Learning Objectives:

• Trace key developmental milestones in the Center's ability to recognize and control it’s knowledge-power
• Identify ethical challenges as community-academic partners work to produce new knowledge
• Detail one community leader's survival strategies for managing academic partners to ensure community benefit

Keywords: Participatory Research, Community Capacity

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

I wish to disclose that I have NO financial interests or other relationship with the manufactures of commercial products, suppliers of commercial services or commercial supporters.