Healthy Native Community Partnership

Since 2005, the University of New Mexico Center for Participatory Research (UNM-CPR) has partnered with the non-profit organization Healthy Native Communities Partnership (HNCP – www.hncpartners.org). HNCP promotes community mobilization and civic engagement to reduce long-standing inequities in Native communities based on the strengths of language, culture, tradition, and community wisdom by: 1) Supporting and strengthening sustainable grassroots community coalitions, 2) Promoting strengths-based community organizing strategies based on cultural renewal, 3) Collaborative leadership development, 4) Web-based technology to support community building, 5) Experiential learning and transformation.

• UNM-CPR has supported HNCP in various capacities, specifically supporting the national Native leadership program Healthy Native Communities Fellowship (HNCF) through participatory evaluation. Through serving as the primary evaluators known as the Learning Team (with other external consultants), UNM-CPR has supported iterative curriculum development and quality improvement.
• HNCP has emerged as one of the many programs that the Indian Health Service (I.H.S) promoted with their Health Promotion/Disease Prevention (HP/DP) initiative. http://www.ihs.gov/hpdp   
• HNCP has sponsored a year-long evidence-based fellowship leadership and mentorship program, which develops and supports teams of community health activists and leaders to organize creative wellness strategies in Native communities and organizations. The leadership program called for Native Teams from across the country to gather three times a year for intensive learning that is hands-on, collaborative and grounded in Native cultural and spiritual teachings. 
• HNCP also sponsors many wellness and capacity-building programs, including digital story training, organizational consultation, and facilitation training. 
• The UNM-HNCP Fellowship Learning Team has used a “participatory evaluation” framework to co-create the design, participate in data collection, and applies the analysis of learnings to support quality improvement of HNCF curriculum and overall program changes. Working with principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR), the learning team has supported internal evaluation capacity building among the HNCF staff so that new directions for the program, including evaluation methods, are grounded in mutual decision-making.