The Morehouse Model

Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM) is widely regarded as a national model on how to advance prevention, health equity, and justice through community engagement. At the heart of MSM’s success is a fundamental belief that effective engagement requires an equal partnership and embraces community leadership.

“That has been our mantra from the beginning,” says Sandra Harris-Hooker, PhD, Senior Vice President of External Affairs and Innovation at MSM. “We’re not here to use our community as a ‘test site.’ We want to know what our community considers its greatest needs—and whether and how our community would like to participate in addressing those needs.”

What does that look like in practice?

MSM’s John C. Smith, MSW, CIM, CIP, and Tabia Henry Akintobi, PhD, MPH, answered that question at the 2024 Collaborative AAHRPP Network (CAN) workshop with “Cruising Together: Values and Practices to Facilitate Community-Engaged Research.” Tabia also was a co-presenter for the AAHRPP Annual Conference session on “Community Engagement – Tips and Guidance for Establishing and Enhancing Community Involvement.”

Professor and Chair of Community Health & Preventive Medicine at MSM, Tabia is the Principal Investigator at the MSM Prevention Research Center and Associate Dean of Community Engagement. John is the IRB Director at the Historically Black College and University (HBCU).

In “Cruising Together …,” they focused on community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community-engaged research (CEnR). Both approaches integrate the community throughout the research process, conducting research “with” the community, not “on” or “in” it.

Tabia and John identified barriers to community engagement—lack of awareness, communication challenges, trust and relationship issues, resource constraints, cultural and linguistic differences, and socioeconomic factors—and shared the following practices that facilitate CBPR and CEnR:

• Develop relationships with community-based organizations to learn their priorities and understand their perceptions of your institution.
• Acknowledge and reward community-engaged partnerships that share resources, provide services, and increase capacities.
• Embody an equity lens.
• Understand power and privilege imbalances. Use your power and privilege to empower and center the voices of community members.
• Invest in workshops and webinars that prioritize community-engaged research concepts and practices, including cultural humility, community-inclusive team science, and equity in scholarly publication and health research communication.

The recommendations reflect lessons learned over more than 25 years of experience by MSM’s award-winning Prevention Research Center (PRC). One of its early, defining moves was to establish a Community Coalition Board (CCB), distinguished in part by its majority community membership and its status as a policy-making board—instead of as an advisory one. In keeping with this governing role, the board developed 10 community values, and every research protocol is evaluated with these values in mind.

The CCB began with one partner community, or neighboring planning unit, and has since expanded to include three more. To help ensure accountability and drive continuous improvement, the CCB conducts an annual satisfaction survey, which Tabia shared during the AAHRPP conference presentation on “Community Engagement - Tips and Guidance for Establishing and Enhancing Community Involvement.”

The assessment tool focuses on four major areas: satisfaction, leadership, involvement, and communications. Results are presented to the CCB for review, comments, and strategic planning.

“It’s a cyclical, iterative process,” Tabia says, one that “builds on the strengths and resources within the community and advances the deep, important work of community-based participatory research.”