Project TEACH (Teaching Equity to Advance Community Health): A capacity building community-academic partnership to achieve health equity

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are uniquely placed to address health disparities. Yet, in order to fund their programs, CBOs have been increasingly required to demonstrate skills in areas for which they have not received training, including: 1)finding/interpreting local health statistics, 2)evidence-based interventions, 3)program evaluation, and 4)community engagement. We developed a collaborative training program, Project TEACH, in which academic faculty provide targeted training and technical assistance to CBOs to increase their capacity to write proposals to obtain funding and effectively conduct programs to reduce health disparities. Since July 2008, faculty at the University of Colorado Denver have trained 35 CBOs across the state of Colorado. Area Health Education Centers (AHECs) located throughout Colorado serve as the local liaisons. Cohorts of approximately ten CBOs at a time participate in each 3-month training. An initial assessment determines the skills and needs of each CBO, then each CBO participates in a 2-day workshop designed specifically to address the needs of the ten participants in each training cohort. In addition, each CBO also receives individual consultation from faculty. TEACH participants have access to resources via project website (http://cctsi.ucdenver.edu/Community-Translation/Pages/ProjectTEACH.aspx) and via information pre-loaded onto a USB drive. Evaluation shows satisfaction by the CBOs, knowledge increases, and accomplishment of specific self-proposed goals, including completion of grant applications. Project TEACH and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment have also produced a website containing county level, racial/ethnic health disparities data on social determinants of health as well as indicators/risk factors of the most relevant chronic health conditions. http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/hs/regionaldata/healthDisparitiesdata.html).