Building community capacity: sustaining the effects of multiple, two-year community-based participatory research projects

Background: The time-limited nature of health and public health research fellowships poses a challenge to trainees' and community partners' efforts to sustain effective, collaborative, community-based participatory research (CBPR) relation- ships. Objectives: This paper presents CBPR case studies of part- nerships between health services research trainees and com- munity organization leaders in a medium-sized city to describe how participation in the partnership altered com- munity partners' understanding and willingness to conduct research and to engage with research-derived data. Methods: Trainees and faculty used participatory methods with community leaders to identify research questions, and conduct and disseminate research. Throughout the process, trainees and faculty included research capacity building of community partners as a targeted outcome. Community partners were asked to reflect retrospectively on community research capacity building in the context of CBPR projects. Reflections were discussed and categorized by the authorship team, who grouped observations into topics that may serve as a foundation for development of future prospective analyses. Results: Important ideas shared include that trainee partici- pation in CBPR may have an enduring impact on the com- munity by increasing the capacity of community partners and agencies to engage in research beyond that which they are conducting with the current trainee. Conclusion: We posit that CBPR with research trainees may have an additive effect on community research capacity when it is conducted in collaboration with community leaders and focuses on a single region. More research is needed to char- acterize this potential outcome.