Advancing Equity in a CBPR Partnership: Seeds of HOPE and the CBPR Charrette Process

Background: Building effective and equitable research partnerships presents challenges, warranting heightened efforts to enhance partnership capacity. Seeds of HOPE (SOH), the Core Research Project at UNC's Prevention Research Center (PRC), uses a CBPR approach to address obesity prevention and economic empowerment for women in rural eastern North Carolina. Even with its impressive record of sustained partnership, the SOH's Community Action Council (CAC) is continually striving to strengthen its approach. Recently, 17 CAC members went through a CBPR Charrette, a multi-step process providing technical assistance to community-academic research partnerships, developed through collaboration between UNC's PRC and CTSA (Clinical Translational Science Award). Methods: The CAC requested a CBPR Charrette to address two challenges: 1) future grant planning/budget development in an era of federal budget cuts; and 2) decision-making power structure between the university and the community. The four steps of a Charrette were conducted over a four month period by a team of 3 CBPR expert consultants (2 community, 1 academic), 2 facilitators, 1 evaluator, and 2 notetakers. Results: Data collected from the Charrette were used to assess CAC strengths, pinpoint challenges, derive solutions, and identify resources. Expert consultants suggested revising CAC's governance structure to adapt to current conditions for partnership equity. The Charrette process introduced an assessment tool that the CAC is using to measure partnership change and growth over time. Conclusion: This session highlights how the CBPR Charrette process helped a partnership grapple productively with challenges and how it applied the advice to enhance equity between community and academic partners.