Developing community health promotion interventions: selecting partners and fostering collaboration

Although an often desired goal, true partnership between community members and university researchers can be difficult to achieve. Strategies implemented in a diabetes prevention and control program in a Latino community may be effective in overcoming hurdles to collaborative research. The development of selection criteria can be useful for objectively choosing a community organization as a partner agency. The implementation of formal partnership principles is proposed as a strategy for building a successful partnership. Partnership principles are a powerful mechanism to assure ethical relations between collaborators. As a strategy for process evaluation, they can help organize data on the extent to which intent has translated into action. They provide a structure for project stability that can outlast individual commitments and a mechanism to keep project commitment on course and maintain active engagement.