An Examination of the Complexity of Power and Race When a Predominately White Institution partners with Black Communities to Address Infant Mortality

Using quantitative and qualitative thematic analysis from an evaluation survey and intensive interviews from the Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families (LIHF), this article explores the unequal power dynamics between academic and community partners in an initiative that addresses disparities in Black infant mortality in Southeastern Wisconsin. Initiated and funded by a public health endowment fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health(UW-SMPH), LIHF began in 2009 in Beloit, Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine, Wisconsin. LIHF is a multi-year community-academic partnership which included community-based planning, establishment of funded and centrally supported community collaboratives, and 1–3-year project grants. Survey and interview respondents revealed that many Black community members and academics perceived white academic partners as avoiding addressing root causes of systemic racism, maintenance of structural power imbalances, and how these disparities are related to the very long history of racism and disparities throughout the state. The white respondents (mostly) saw a lack of willingness and/or capacity for the Black community partners most vocally involved to effectively deal with the policy, systems and environments that contributed to the disparities. This was further hampered by the structure of the initiative which seperated the fiscal and administrative control from implementation. Evaluation participants expressed concerns regarding the structure of the Initiatives which failed to center the voices of those most impacted. Evaluators concluded that if the community and academic partners are interested in making long-term impacts, they will have to let go of traditional ways of community-academic collaborations and begin to embrace future possibilities to more effectively impact communities of color.