Learning from Long-Standing Community Partnerships: Strengthening CDC’s PRC Program by Enhancing Community Voices Through Storytelling

Abstract Information: The Prevention Research Centers (PRC) Program is a network of 26 university-based centers that conduct community-engaged applied public health research. PRCs engage their communities through Community Advisory Boards (CABs) throughout the research and translational phases to center local knowledge and lived experiences. Requested by community members, our evaluation includes a narrative history of long-standing CAB members and their role in the PRC Program. We interviewed 6 community partners from diverse communities for their perspectives on community engagement best practices, how to build and maintain trust, barriers and challenges faced, and benefits of long-standing partnerships, including how existing trust affected their ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sharing their stories will provide insight on how to best create and nurture community-academic partnerships, the benefits and impacts of those partnerships, and opportunities to strengthen the role of community voices within the PRC Program in the future.

Relevance Statement: The Prevention Research Centers (PRC) Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is a network of 26 university-based centers that conduct community-engaged research. CDC has funded PRCs around the country for over 35 years to study evidence-based strategies for preventing chronic diseases in underserved communities. As demonstrated by a growing body of literature, there are many benefits of community-engaged research, including ensuring that research topics are relevant and desired by the community (Israel, 2005). As part of the PRC Network, the PRC Community Committee (CC) was established in 2002 to help increase community involvement and community voices on a national level (CDC, 2009). The CC has representation from both PRC staff and, for some PRCs, their CAB members; the CC helps bridge the gaps between PRCs and their communities and provides a space for the CC to collaborate and influence community-based research within the PRC Program. Many PRCs have been funded as part of the Network for 25+ years, and some have maintained partnerships with their CABs for nearly as long. These partnerships can bring a unique perspective not only to the role of community engagement in the PRC Program over time, but also to the importance of the trust that is developed and sustained over time (Busse, 2022). During engagement in the PRC Program evaluation, CAB members asked to tell the story of the CC to help demonstrate the benefits and impacts that long-standing community partnerships have on their communities, individual PRCs, and the entire PRC Program. Seven long-standing CAB members and their corresponding PRC Principal Investigators shared their stories via semi-structured interviews. The interviews included 4 high-level themes: (1) creating and nurturing community partnerships, (2) Community Committee history, (3) benefits, and opportunities for the future, and (4) readiness to respond to COVID-19. This study illustrates how successful PRCs build trust between academics and community members over many decades, and how CDC can best enhance the community voice via the Community Committee. Getting both researcher and community member perspectives highlights the benefits and successes of long-standing community partnerships—a focus that is currently lacking in the literature. Finally, it helped demonstrate how long-standing trust and community involvement enable PRCs to leverage existing ties, mobilize communities, and respond quickly to community needs during a public health emergency such as COVID-19.

References: Busse KR, Lemon SC, Comerford BP, et al. Prevention Research Centers and COVID-19: models of a community-engaged response to a public health emergency. Public Health Rep. 2022;137(2):226-233. CDC, US Department of Health and Human Services. A Collective Voice for Well-Being: The Story of the National Community Committee. 2009. Accessed March 14, 2023. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/23397 Israel BA, Parker EA, Rowe Z, et al. Community-based participatory research: lessons learned from the Centers for Children's Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research. Environ Health Perspect. 2005;113(10):1463-1471.