Addressing disparities between African American and Caucasian infant death rates: Impact on community and organizational systems

The SevenPrinciples (7Ps) Project is a partnership between the San Francisco Department of Public Health, numerous community-based organizations and the Family Health Outcomes Project, University of California, San Francisco. The goal of 7Ps, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded project of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, is to eliminate the disparity between San Francisco's African-American and White infant mortality rates and to improve the health of African American infants, their families and communities. It is also to identify promising interventions that could be disseminated by CDC and used successfully in other communities. The Project is in its last year of funding and is instituting changes in community and organizational systems. These changes include the integration of anti-racism and provider cultural competency trainings into the health department and the managed care plans serving African Americans, the capacity to conduct social marketing campaigns as a successful educational intervention, and the organizational awareness, leadership and capacity within community-based agencies to identify and address root causes of health disparities. This presentation will briefly describe the project and, using the CDC stages of change model, will show how through demonstration, evaluation and capacity building the project has affected community and agency systems. Recommendations and lessons learned to assist other partnerships attempting to plan and achieve community/organizational/structural change are informed by insights gained from interviews conducted with key informants including Coalition partners and individuals who became change agents in this process.