Bronx community collaborative opportunities for research and education (Bronx C2ORE): Developing a research capacity-building model

Over the past 2 1/2 years, Urban Health Plan, Inc., a network of federally qualified community health centers in the Bronx & Queens, NY, & Albert Einstein College of Medicine have forged a partnership to build sustainable capacity for community-based clinical research. BxC2ORE is NIH-funded by NIMHD and situated in urban poor neighborhoods. Seeking to create an equal union of an academic medical center PI with a community-based organization PI, the unique perspective from each of these partners will be discussed along with innovative methods used to address challenges that arose during the course of the partnership. These challenges include: communicating in a common language - clinical practice vs. academic practice; gaining consensus on priorities for clinical research training and research project selection; capitalizing on strengths of each institution; sustaining capacity and infrastructure. The success of this partnership may also be attributed to the joint funding of a community research associate who facilitated the project, developed documents to chronicle its infrastructure building, and assisted with the evaluation and replication of the model that is being developed. BxC2ORE also supports Einstein evaluation experts to assess and assist in work plan course correction when necessary. Despite the inherent challenges in developing a mutually beneficial academic-community partnership, BxC2ORE has created a partnership with sufficient infrastructure to be sustained past the current funding. We will share lessons learned from three years of collaboration, as well as our interim partnership evaluation and tangible outcomes achieved.