Community Capacity Building: A Key Element of Sustainability

Background: The Healthy Environments Partnership (HEP) is a community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership comprised of community-based organizations and public health practice and academic partners working to develop, implement and evaluate interventions to reduce cardiovascular disparities in Detroit, Michigan. HEP is implementing a multilevel intervention to increase physical activity via walking groups, capacity building, community action and policy change. A major focus of this work is to sustain community members' access to the resources made available through the intervention. Methods/Approach: One challenge of community intervention research is the sustainability of resources (e.g. program services) beyond initial funding. HEP has developed a sustainability approach emphasizing community capacity across intervention levels (e.g., individual, organizational), recognizing that such capacity is required for sustainability. We assessed capacity in the context of this intervention, applying an established community capacity framework (developed and adapted by Robert Goodman and colleagues and Nicholas Freudenberg). Findings: We consider dimensions of community capacity (e.g., leadership, participation) across intervention levels, providing examples of capacity built across 10 dimensions specified by the framework (e.g., training community members to implement walking groups). We discuss additional areas of capacity-building opportunity (e.g., providing training in grant writing for organizations hoping to host walking groups). Additionally, we discuss the contributions of a CBPR approach, which explicitly values the autonomy, capacity, and skills inherent in the community and actively engages community members at each stage of the process. We discuss the implications of our findings for enhancing community capacity as a critical component of sustainability.