Why Community Partnerships?

The most significant gaps for health promotion and disease prevention lie in medical practices in the United States: a focus on the individual to the exclusion of the family and certainly of the community, a focus on cure of disease rather than prevention of disease and health promotion, and the tacit use of European American cultural patterns as the appropriate form of health care delivery rather than a multicultural, cultural competence approach.

These themes have systematically disadvantaged low-income people and people of color, and have reduced the effectiveness of a traditional American strength: the power of community understanding and action.

Our goal is to work with & expand a coalition of partners to enhance the capabilities of families in South Park for health promotion & disease prevention. The South Park Community Partnership is a work in progress. It attempts to merge anthropological theory and methods conceived as Community-Based Participatory Research to achieve both educational and community empowerment goals. The most powerful aspect of this research is the community agencies’ pleasure with having students who are not only extra help, but delightful partners.