Empowering community based organizations (CBOs) through research capacity

Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) intends to (and does) increase participation of community based organizations (CBOs) in research by inviting CBOs into partnerships with academic researchers. Those partnerships, however, do not focus on building research capacity within the CBO itself. Thus, the CBO gains little research capacity and skills for designing and conducting its own research and then inviting academic researchers to partner with them, on its own conditions. The locus of research control remains predominantly in the hands of academic researchers.

A one-year CBPR Demonstration Training Project was designed to address this gap in CBPR, with the objective of building within the structure of a CBO (a) capacity and skills to design and implement CBPR research (b) that gathers data to improve community health and evaluate program, and (c) write successful funding proposals using evidence based data the CBO has collected.. Funded by the Paso del Norte Foundation and conducted under the auspices of Center for Border Health Research, El Paso, Texas, three CBOs participated – one each from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, one El Paso County, Texas and Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The Project has been completed with all CBOs having completed their research design, implemented their project, completed analyses and are now engaged in utilizing their research findings to bring about changes in the communities they serve. All CBO research teams have presented their findings at professional conferences. A second year of the project, revised on the basis of an evaluation, has been funded and will be implemented.