Don't duplicate – strengthen and sustain: Lessons learned on how to develop a sustainable effort to address health disparities on a college campus

Health disparities continue to negatively impact communities across the U.S. Academic institutions are important instruments to counteract this trend but need to both effectively introduce key concepts and sustain pipeline efforts by developing key partnerships across the college campus. This approach was utilized in a Project EXPORT grant with the Research Education and Training Core's goal to develop a comprehensive, coordinated, and collaborative program of recruitment, education, and retention designed to expand the workforce of health providers and researchers working to reduce health disparities. In order to accomplish this and more importantly, to sustain activities after the grant ends, it was important to strategically scan the campus to determine: (1) what is currently being offered?; (2) what are the strengths of current programs?; and (3) how can the grant help strengthen and frame the emphasis to address health disparities? Lessons learned throughout this process were to convene a key mass of faculty to support emphasis around health disparities and develop partnerships across campus to bridge existing gaps. Specifically, this manifested itself by: (1) partnerships with campus minority student organizations, departments and existing mentoring programs for minority students to introduce components encouraging students to enter careers addressing health disparities; (2) developing interactive modules to be placed in existing courses across disciplines to discuss a paradigm for addressing health disparities through health equity; and (3) to convene faculty from across disciplines to develop a systematic research agenda around health disparities.