The Center for Participatory Research has partnered with the Center for Native American Health, and the Transdisciplinary Research Equity and Engagement (TREE) Center to co-direct WEAVE NM:
Wide Engagement for Assessing COVID-19 Vaccination Equity (WEAVE NM)
Funder: National Institutes of Health, Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 disparities grant application (ROA, OTA-20-011E), March 2020-2021.
Partners include: First Nations Community HealthSource, Cultivating Communities, National Latino Behavioral Health, PIRE, Healthy Native Communities Partnership, Black Leadership Council, and the Tri-Chapter Checkerboard Area of the Navajo Nation, and a Communities of Practice Network of 200+ partnered organizations
Racial and ethnic minority populations are more likely to contract COVID-19, be hospitalized and die, but are less likely to be tested and vaccinated.
Distrust from a Legacy of Human Rights Violations and Community Mistrust of Western Medicine and Research.
Lack of attention of the impact of COVID-19 on rural racial/ethnic populations in the U.S.
Our research approach draws from the Racial Equity Theory of Change (RETOC) which emphasizes the translation of research evidence to action. RETOC is aimed at reducing social disparities through the application of: 1) Cultural representations (language, images, narratives, stories and cognitive cues that form the public’s conventional wisdom about vaccines); 2) Social and institutional practices (racialized and colorblind norms, regulations and standard operating procedures of public and private institutions that actually generate racially biased outcomes); and 3) Public policies (laws that directly allocate public resources and indirectly influence the distribution of private resources in ways that have greater negative impact on communities of color). Continuous engagement of the communities most burdened by COVID- 19 is a core tenet of the research design with a focus on CBPR and narrative story telling.
WEAVE NM will employ a mixed method approach to answer our research questions including:
1) Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR);
2) Narrative/story-telling using digital stories and catalyst films to uncover the complexities of lived experiences of N.M.’s rural and urban Native and Latinx communities with goals of healing and strategies for improved vaccine uptake and larger structural health equity; and
3) A mixed mode (cell phone, web based and in-person) quantitative survey to identify the historical and current individual and local system-level barriers and facilitators to vaccine access and uptake among African American, Latinx and American Indian populations.
Community-Academic Partnership Team
Principal Investigators: Lisa Cacari Stone, PhD, MS, MA (Contact PI) TREE Center (NIMHD Grant # U54 MD004811-09); Tassy Parker, PhD, RN (Seneca, Beaver Clan), Director, CNAH; and Nina Wallerstein, DrPH, Director, UNM CPR
Co-Investigators: Drs. Nancy Pandhi, Akshay Sood, Shannon Sanchez-Youngman, Vincent Werito, Lorenda Belone, Daniel Shattuck
Community Principal Investigators: Dr. Linda Son Stone, Silvia Sierra, MA, Marita Jones, MPH, Elroy Keetso, MS, Catherine L. McGill and Frederick Sandoval, MPA
CEAL at a glance:
