Objectives-Our community-academic partnership employed community-based participatory research to develop and pilot a simple, peer-led intervention to promote weight loss, which can prevent diabetes and eliminate racial/ethnic disparities in incident diabetes among overweight adults with prediabetes.Methods-We recruited overweight adults at community sites, performed oral glucose tolerance testing to identify persons with blood glucose levels in the prediabetes range, and randomized eligible people to a peer-led lifestyle intervention group or delayed intervention in 1 year. Outcomes, including weight, blood pressure, and health behaviors, were measured at baseline and 3, 6, and 12 months.Results-More than half of those tested (56%, or 99 of 178) had prediabetes and enrolled in the study. Participants were predominantly Spanish-speaking, low-income, undereducated women. The intervention group lost significantly more weight than the control group and maintained weight loss at 12 months (7.2 versus 2.4 pounds; P < .01). One fourth (24 of 99) of participants progressed to diabetes.Correspondence should be sent to Carol R. Horowitz, Dept of Health Evidence and Policy, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1077, New York, New York 10029 (carol.horowitz@ mountsinai.org). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the "Reprints/Eprints" link. . Contributors P. Parikh managed data collection and analysis, and led the writing. E. P. Simon codirected study implementation and reviewed and interpreted focus group transcripts. K. Fei and H. Looker performed data analysis and led interpretation of results. C. Goytia assisted with recruitment and data collection and reviewed and interpreted focus group transcripts. C. R. Horowitz directed the research design and oversaw all aspects of study implementation and analysis. All authors helped to conceptualize ideas, interpret findings, and write and review drafts of the article. Human Participant ProtectionThis study was approved by the Mount Sinai School of Medicine's institutional review board. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptAm J Public Health. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 March 16. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptConclusions-In underserved minority communities, prediabetes prevalence may be higher than previously reported. Low-cost, community-based interventions can succeed in encouraging weight loss to prevent diabetes.Despite compelling evidence that diabetes is escalating in the United States and that promoting weight loss can mitigate its rise, implementation of effective, sustainable diabetes prevention interventions has been slow and sporadic. [1][2][3][4] More than 1 in 8 American adults have diabetes. 5 Blacks and Hispanics are hit hardest by this epidemic: diabetes mortality for these groups is nearly double that of Whites. [6][7][8] Half of Hispanic and nearly half of Black children born in the first decade of this century will develop diabetes if adequate preventive measures are not taken. 9 To date, the most ef...

Development and implementation of effective, sustainable, and scalable interventions that advance equity could be propelled by innovative and inclusive partnerships. Readied catalytic frameworks that foster communication, collaboration, a shared vision, and transformative translational research across scientific and non-scientific divides are needed to foster rapid generation of novel solutions to address and ultimately eliminate disparities. To achieve this, we transformed and expanded a community-academic board into a translational science board with members from public, academic and private sectors. Rooted in team science, diverse board experts formed topic-specific “accelerators”, tasked with collaborating to rapidly generate new ideas, questions, approaches, and projects comprising patients, advocates, clinicians, researchers, funders, public health and industry leaders. We began with four accelerators—digital health, big data, genomics and environmental health—and were rapidly able to respond to funding opportunities, transform new ideas into clinical and community programs, generate new, accessible, actionable data, and more efficiently and effectively conduct research. This innovative model has the power to maximize research quality and efficiency, improve patient care and engagement, optimize data democratization and dissemination among target populations, contribute to policy, and lead to systems changes needed to address the root causes of disparities.

Lifestyle interventions can prevent diabetes through weight loss, but they are rarely translated for use in underserved communities. The aim of this study was to describe how a community–academic partnership formed and developed a program to address local health disparities by developing a low-cost, culturally and economically appropriate, peer-led community-based diabetes prevention program. Using a participatory approach, the partnership chose to focus on diabetes prevention, and co-developed all intervention, recruitment, research, and evaluation strategies. The partnership’s philosophy to maintain high clinical and scientific standards paired with their ability to represent and engage the community facilitated the development of a randomized controlled trial that achieved statistically significant and sustained weight loss, and the recruitment of a largely Spanish-speaking, low income, uninsured population. The success of this intervention lies in the partnership’s commitment to the community, co-ownership of research, and a careful balance between academic rigor and community engagement and relevance.

Background Successful community–academic research partnerships require building the capacity of both community-based organizations (CBOs) and academics to conduct collaborative research of mutual interest and benefit. Yet, information about the needs and goals of research-interested CBOs is lacking. Our partnership aimed to conduct a community research needs assessment and to use results to develop future capacity-building programs for CBOs. Methods Based on our review of the literature, informal interviews with research-interested CBOs and community-engaged research groups locally and nationally, we developed a needs assessment survey. Key domains of this survey included history and experience with research collaboration, interest in specific research topics, and preference for learning format and structure. We trained community health workers (CHWs) to recruit senior leaders from CBOs in New York City (NYC) and encourage them to complete an on-line survey. Results Fully 54% (33/61) of CBOs completed the needs assessment. Most (69%) reported involvement with research or evaluation in the last 2 years and 33% had some funding for research. Although 75% had collaborated with academic institutions in the past, 58% did not rate this experience well. The four areas respondents prioritized for skills building were program evaluation, developing needs assessments, building surveys, and understanding statistical analyses. They were less interested in learning to build collaborations with academics. Conclusions A formal needs assessment of research training and educational needs of CBOs revealed that most had experience, albeit negative, with academic collaborations. CBO leaders wanted to build skills to conduct and analyze assessments and program evaluations. Our community-academic partnership is using these findings to develop a research capacity-building course. Other partnerships should consider conducting such assessments to transform the capacity of CBOs to be active research partners and leaders.