Partnership for a Better Roseland: Utilizing CBPR to Address School-Related Violence in a Chicago community

School-related youth violence is a reoccurring issue in many urban communities. Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is an engaging approach which can build and strengthen partnerships among community stakeholders while providing equitable involvement from an academic institution. The process of partnership building within CBPR creates a discourse which can translate community issues, e.g. school-related youth violence to a research question, design and implementation. Partnership for a Better Roseland (PBR) is a collaboration of nine organizations conducting CBPR with Northwestern University in Roseland-a low income, African American community on the far south side of Chicago. PBR is a grassroots response which capitalizes on the strength of CBPR to address the increasing youth violence perpetrated in and around community schools. Over the past 15 months PBR has built a strong collaboration through trust building, research training, assessment and creating the infrastructure needed to conduct research in Roseland. In addition to completing partnership activities, i.e. mission statement, memorandum of agreement, research question and CBPR training; the varying knowledge of research among partners also identified a need to adapt and administer an assessment to determine partners' research readiness. The progress of PBR has resulted in a youth violence research study to assess the impact of violence among Roseland youth. Partnership building activities utilized within PBR have created a foundation to conduct CBPR in Roseland. Despite challenges experienced in the development of the collaboration, there is significant increase in the value of research among partners as well as its benefits in achieving community specific outcomes.