A community-academic-medical partnership's view of racial justice forms at the crossroads of institutions' view of diversity and community engagement

For more than six years, our community-medical-academic partnership has worked together to address priority health disparities in Greensboro, NC. The Institute of Medicine's Unequal Treatment report, and their urgent call for further research on health disparities, was the impetus for our formation. Our partnership, The Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative (GHDC), began a journey to investigate how social and racial justice can be achieved through exposing and dismantling institutional racism pervasive in health care systems. Our partnership is built on the foundation of values, concepts, and principles of Undoing Racism™, a prerequisite training required of all GHDC members. This foundation builds trust among members and provides a common ground for racial justice to inform current public health approaches to increase cultural competence among practitioners and community engagement among researchers. The Collaborative is committed to achieving social justice as evidenced by our struggle through federally- and locally-funded research and intervention initiatives to define racial justice as a foundation for healthy living. The goal of this presentation is to explain how and why current institutional views on cultural competence and community engagement would benefit from incorporating GHDC's view of dismantling barriers to trust.