Diabetes Screening and Prevention in a High-Risk, Medically Isolated Border Community.

Introduction: A project in a Texas border community setting, Prevention Organized against Diabetes and Dialysis with Education and Resources (PODER), offered diabetes prevention information, screening, and medical referrals. The setting was a large, longstanding flea market that functions as a shopping mall for low-income people. The priority population included medically underserved urban and rural Mexican Americans.

Walk together children with no wasted steps: community-academic partnering for equal power in NIH proposal development.

Background: Community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches equitably involve community members and researchers throughout the research process. A developing literature examines problems in CBPR partnerships, but less is written about community groups using CBPR to access university resources to address community-prioritized health concerns.

Objective: We sought to examine issues in two stages of a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded CBPR partnership: (1) joint proposal preparation, and (2) grant administration.

Environmental risk factors of disease in the Cameron Park Colonia, a Hispanic community along the Texas-Mexico border.

Objectives: This report summarizes the results of a cross-sectional study in Cameron Park in 2000-2001 to identify disease prevalence and health concerns among colonia residents and to identify environmental exposures to potentially adverse environmental conditions.

Results: Asthma and allergies were among the most prevalent respiratory diseases reported in both adults and children of Cameron Park. Other diseases affecting the community in higher numbers included diabetes and heart disease/high blood pressure.

CBPR as community health intervention: institutionalizing CBPR within community based organizations.

Background: A community-academy partnership was created with a commitment to developing a program for institutionalizing community-based participatory research (CBPR) capacity within community-based organizations (CBOs), with the intention to enhance CBOs' existing capabilities to understand and improve community health.

Objectives: This article presents the design and conceptual foundations for a year-long CBPR education and training program in which CBO teams learn research design, discuss the principles of CBPR, design and implement a community health-related research project tailored to their program and community, conduct analyses, and initiate integration of the results into the organization and community. One objective is to integrate a commitment to and the practice of CBPR within CBOs' program and policies.

Promotor(a)s, the organizations in which they work, and an emerging paradox: how organizational structure and scope impact promotor(a)s' work.

Objective: To analyze how organizational structures and scope (geographic and programmatic) generate dissonance between the organization and its workers, creating a paradox with policy implications for access to health care in hard-to-reach populations. The workers are lay community health workers called promotor(a)s. The organizations are community based organizations in which the promotor(a)s work, either as volunteers, part-time or as full-time wage staff.

Community health worker training and certification programs in the United States: findings from a national survey.

Objective: To analyze trends and various approaches to professional development in selected community health worker (CHW) training and certification programs in the United States. We examined the expected outcomes and goals of different training and certification programs related to individual CHWs as well as the community they serve.

Method: A national survey of CHW training and certification programs.

Embracing the local: enriching scientific research, education, and outreach on the Texas-Mexico border through a participatory action research partnership.

Cameron Park, Texas, is a colonia (an isolated, unincorporated rural settlement without municipal improvements) on the Texas-Mexico border in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, in Cameron County near Brownsville, Texas. Cameron Park has a population of 5,961 residents, 99.3% of whom are Hispanic.