The African American Breast Cancer Outreach Project

Abstract

This article describes the African American Breast Cancer Screening Outreach project, a community-based participatory intervention that was designed to increase the numbers of African American women screened for breast cancer in Texas, especially those who are poor and underserved. The project was very successful, and between 1998 and 2003, more than 114,000 people received cancer information and education and 8,459 African American women who had contact with the project were screened. Several lessons were learned from these experiences that are pertinent to engaging communities to partner with researchers in conducting community-based participatory research and illustrate the application of guiding principles outlined by Israel and colleagues in 1998.

Community-Based Participatory Research: A Review of the Literature With Strategies for Community Engagement

“…26 -34 Studies have shown that approaching research from a CBPR orientation has increased breast cancer screening in women from Texas, increased safe sex behaviors among gay men in China, increased physical activity among Iranian women, improved the quality of food provision to Guyanese elderly, contributed to weight loss for a group of rural African-American faith community, and led to less marijuana and drug use in a group of African-American adolescents. 32,[35][36][37][38][39] Despite these research projects with broad and diverse populations and public health issues, the CBPR has been applied only occasionally to address the health of parents and their children. Community action against asthma represents one prominent example of a CBPR research project among a university, government agencies, and community-based organizations, which focuses on low-income ethnic minority children by working to improve asthma-related health outcomes by reducing household triggers.…”

Planning and implementation of a participatory evaluation strategy: A viable approach in the evaluation of community-based participatory programs addressing cancer disparities

“…More recently, public health professionals have more broadly embraced this concept in the United States and the results have been very encouraging (Adams ML, 2007; Christopher et. al., 2007; English et.…”