Sisters Working It Out: Preparing community health workers to partner with academia

The use of community health workers (CHW) continue to emerge as a best practice in improving public health, however, there is not much information on capacity-building efforts to prepare CHWs to participate equitably in community-academic projects. This presentation will address the training efforts of one community-academic partnership with Northwestern University. SWIO is a peer education program that engages Community Health Workers to target the most medically underserved parts of the African American community for women's health outreach activities, particularly around breast and cervical cancer. SWIO is a unique program that combines several aspects of community outreach with an innovative health advocacy module. This presentation will address the details of one community-academic partnership with Northwestern University. In 2011, SWIO embarked on a 12 month partnership building initiative with Northwestern University to assess the feasibility of a community academic partnership that primarily mobilized Community Health Workers. The partnership focused on capacity-building activities for both the community and academic faculty around topics such as Research 101, Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) 101, Internal Review Board (IRB) Human Subjects Protection, developing research questions, development of roles and responsibilities, shared decision making processes, establishing conflict resolution strategies. Presenters will share the successes, challenges, lessons learned, anticipated future practices and the overall impact of this community-academic partnership.