Photovoice: Seeing the voices of an urban African-American community participating in a Community-Based Participatory Research project

Photovoice has merged as a participatory strategy in the field of health promotion. Photovoice can serve as a natural extension of community-based projects by sustaining the community dialogue beyond the original project goal. Over the last three years, the self-identified Central Community Healthy Group (CCHG) has served as a community-advisory group for an academic-community partnership utilizing Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) to design and implement a pilot wellness/nutrition intervention targeting 8-12 year olds and their families. The backdrop of this initiative is the Central Neighborhood, one of Cleveland, Ohio's most impoverished and disadvantaged areas. Following the intervention, the CCHG continued and developed the slogan - Eat Healthy, Feel Good, Live Longer and distributed healthy recipes at local sites but more importantly, engaged others about ways to live healthy living in their challenged neighborhood. Building upon this momentum, a Photovoice project was implemented for residents to raise awareness on health and wellness issues impacting the community. Residents embraced this and took pictures around designated themes: environmental factors, social support, diet/nutrition, and prevention/treatment. Ten CCHG members embarked on this new project with vigor and showed both the positive and negative aspects of their community around the topic of health and wellness. This Photovoice project was a natural springboard from the original project and was successful by: 1) continuing the leadership role of residents; 2) sustaining and building upon the CBPR project; and 3) sustaining the academic-community partnership beyond the original research question scope.