Sustaining CBPR Projects: Lessons Learned Developing Latina Community Groups

– Community members participated in health fairs.

– Interest meetings took place during the health fairs and were mostly attended by women in their early thirties.

– Interest groups were started at a local elementary school before the health events. These groups were with parents (mothers) whose children attended the school.

– MAPPR hired a community engagement research assistant. She mailed out a regular bulletin to all participants with updates about the group, and events and resources in the area.

– A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was developed together to clarify the roles of the research team and the participants.

– Per request of the participants, we organized a series of guest speakers to hold ‘charlas’ (talks) about mental health (depression, PTSD, stress/anxiety), breast health and breast cancer, nutrition, HIV and STDs, and the Affordable Care Act. The women were also interested in exercise classes.

– New participants were recruited during the health events and by existing participants. Attendance jumped from 5 to 14 participants between the 1^st and 3^rd meeting.

– Participants expressed an interest in learning about nutrition, yoga, mental health, domestic violence, CPR/First Aid, bullying, buying your first home, stress reduction, and parenting. MAPPR also started a private Facebook group (on request of participants) to communicate with the women.

– The women developed the mission, vision, and description of their group.

– MAPPR helped facilitate partnerships for HU (figure 3).

– After a few months, HeA participants started to bring their own updates about things happening in the area. They also became more involved in gathering information (e.g. about spaces to meet) and reporting back to the group. In our regular meetings, we continued to reflect on what was going well, where we could make improvements, and how to transition leadership more to the group.

– Three women expressed interest in being trained to become Zumba instructors and a MAPPR researcher started working with them on how to teach Zumba.

– HU quickly expressed interest to become involved with projects and events outside the group. In fact, part of their early established mission was to engage in community service.

– During meetings, the group developed roles to facilitate meetings, including communications between group members, providing healthy snacks, note taking, childcare, inviting guest speakers, coordinating volunteer opportunities. They established roles such as the “meeting facilitator” and “note taker”. The note taker also created her personal resource binder in which she files the pamphlets, contact cards of the presenters, etc.

– There was interest and attempts to reach this stage by participants, but the group was unable to continue. Challenges included interpersonal dynamics among the women and uneven commitment.

– HU planned their own public event.

– HU continues to meet at the YMCA and have an active online platform for disseminating wellness-related events and information.