Asserting the right to health: CBPR as a vehicle to promote racial health and health care equity

Historically, African Americans have suffered many inequities including exclusion from participating in and benefitting from rigorous research. A changing paradigm ushered in community based participatory research with the prospect for historically marginalized persons to participate, as equal partners, in the generation of knowledge through the research process. Our community-academic-medical partnership, the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative, has capitalized on the tenets of CBPR in efforts to promote racial equity in health and health care in Greensboro, NC and further. Grounded in the concepts and principles of The People's Institute of Survival and Beyond's (PISAB) Undoing Racism™ training, our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-disciplinary team works to expose and eliminate institutional racism. Our development as a collaborative was an inclusive process that involved further education and discussion of institutional culture and institutional racism, cultural sharing and structured storytelling that culminated in the establishment of a Full Value Contract to cement the terms of our working relationships. In this presentation, we will describe our genesis and evolution with a focus on our foundational elements of Undoing Racism™ training, CBPR training, our Full Value Contract, IRB training for non-traditional investigators and our by-laws that have shaped our Collaborative and sustained our efforts, over the past six years, to promote health equity in the pursuit of social justice.