HealthMatters Community Academic Partnership for People with Developmental Disabilities

HealthMatters Community-Academic Partnership (HealthMatters CAP) is a collaboration between two community-based organizations (NorthPointe Resources in Illinois and ARCA in New Mexico) and an academic institution (University of Illinois at Chicago) supporting people with developmental disabilities (DD). Through HealthMatters CAP, we are introducing a new approach for community-based organizations and academic institutions to work together and find practical solutions that people with DD can use to maintain healthy lifestyles. This presentation will discuss innovative practices being developed to mobilize organizations serving people with DD and improve support for people with DD. The HealthMatters CAP Team will review the processes they've used to forge collaborations between community-based organizations and academic institutions. Their innovative work aims to create bi-directional infrastructures that promote culturally relevant research, service learning activities, and sustainable evidence-based trainings to translate results into measurable outcomes for people with DD. By incorporating shared experiences with their new HealthMatters CAP for people with DD, the HealthMatters CAP Team will present strategies related to organizational awareness and readiness among key stakeholders used to do the following: 1) mobilize community academic partnerships, 2) build organizational capacity, and 3) improve community integration among people with DD. We will discuss emerging questions, such as, "Where & how are research questions be generated? How are we maximizing service-learning for our programs and services? How are we initiating training relationships with community-based organizations and academic institutions/health centers?"