Toward strategic measures of community-partnered capacity for policy change

There has been much recent research on the assessment of community capacity to engage in successful CBPR partnerships. However, as Vasquez, Minkler, and Shepard (2006) have recently noted in their Kellogg Foundation funded case study analysis of the impacts of CBPR on healthy public policy, there has so far been little research focused on the impacts of CBPR at the policy level. More specifically, to my knowledge, there has been no reported community-based participatory research project directed at evaluating what specific measures of community and partnership capacity would provide the most useful and strategic basis for assessing the strengths/capacity of CBPR partnerships to engage in policy change interventions. Minkler, Vasquez, Tajik, and Petersen (2006) have recently built on the previous work of Goodman et al. (1998), and Freudenberg (2004), to provide a framework for evaluating the dimensions of CBPR capacity with most direct relevance for policy interventions. Building on this work by Minkler et al., this presentation will report on the development of a CBPR project that engaged partners in Detroit REACH and the Detroit Urban Research Center in proposing and critically evaluating a set of measures judged by partners to be the most strategically valuable for assessing and strengthening the capacity of CBPR partnerships to engage in community-driven policy interventions.