Academic health centers around the country want to build more trusting relationships with diverse, under-resourced neighborhoods to improve health equity and outcomes. But many minority communities have historically regarded university health investigators with skepticism and even suspicion.
To bridge this gap in trust, academics and healthcare providers should pay closer attention to the voices of the people who live in these communities, learn about their lives and health needs and work to build trusting, long-term partnerships.
Those are aims of a major new effort of the community engagement core group at the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI) in the Nickerson Gardens Housing Development. This is the largest housing development in Los Angeles, housing over 3,000 residents.
“We are taking a place-based approach in Nickerson Gardens, holding listening sessions with both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking residents,” said Nicole Wolfe, Ph.D., associate director of the Community Engagement core group at the SC CTSI. “We want to engage in bidirectional communication to build a close relationship with the community. We don’t come in as the experts. Community members, instead, are the experts. We’re here to learn from them.”
The rest of the Community Engagement team have also been working at Nickerson Gardens to improve residents’ access to health services and bolster health education efforts, which they hope will positively influence health outcomes.
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