Neighborhoods working in partnership: Enhancing the capacity of community residents to engage in policy advocacy

There have been increasing calls for community-academic-practice partnerships to have a broader effect on health through engaging the participation of community members in policy advocacy. Neighborhoods Working in Partnership: Building Capacity for Policy Change (NWP), a project of the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center (URC) in partnership with PolicyLink, aims to enhance the capacity of neighborhood residents and organizations to engage in the policy change process to positively impact the health of families in Detroit. The URC is a community-based participatory research partnership which builds upon the strengths of the communities involved, to conduct etiologic research, public health interventions, and policy advocacy aimed at understanding and addressing health inequities. The goals of the NWP are to: strengthen policy advocacy skills within local neighborhoods; extend community voices into the policy making arena; and impact policies aimed at creating healthy neighborhoods. In this presentation, we will provide a rationale for NWP, and discuss the process used which included: 3 Train-the-Trainers workshops conducted by PolicyLink with over fifty participants; and a 4-session series of workshops carried out by community and academic trainers in 7 neighborhoods in Detroit with approximately 225 participants – almost half of whom were youth. We will describe and analyze the: content of the curriculum; process of developing and tailoring the curriculum for different neighborhoods, languages, adults, youth; recruitment procedures; and methods used to evaluate the workshops. We will discuss lessons learned regarding implementation of a training program (e.g., curricular design issues), and implications for conducting policy advocacy capacity building efforts.