Principles of Community Engagement (Second Edition)

4. INITIATING A PROJECT WITH A COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPING A
COMMUNITY ADVISORY BOARD
As described in Chapter 1, partnerships evolve over time Often, the first
steps toward engagement are the most difficult to take The vignettes in this
section demonstrate some effective ways of initiating research collaborations
A. How do you start working with a community?
Daniel S. Blumenthal, MD, MPH
Challenge
In the mid-1980s, the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta was a new
institution, having been founded only a few years earlier Because its mission
called for service to underserved communities, two contiguous low-income
African American neighborhoods in southeast Atlanta were engaged These
neighborhoods, Joyland and Highpoint, had a combined population of about
5,000 and no established community organization Morehouse dispatched a
community organizer to the area, and he spent the next few months learning
about the community He met the community leaders, ministers, businesspeople,
school principals, and agency heads, and he secured credibility by
supporting neighborhood events and even buying t-shirts for a kids’ softball
team Soon, he was able to bring together the leaders, who now knew and
trusted him (and, by extension, Morehouse), to create and incorporate the
Joyland-Highpoint Community Coalition (JHCC)
With the help of the community organizer, the JHCC conducted an assessment
of the community’s health needs, mostly by surveying people where
they gathered and worked Drug abuse was at the top of the community’s
problem list, and Morehouse secured a grant to conduct a project on preventing
substance abuse Most of the grant was subcontracted to the JHCC,
which was able to use the funds to hire a project director (who also served
as the organization’s executive director) and other staff
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