Development and evaluation of a toolkit to assess partnership readiness for community-based participatory research

An earlier investigation by academic and community co-investigators led to the development of the Partnership Readiness for Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Model, which defined major dimensions and key indicators of partnership readiness. As a next step in this process, we used qualitative methods, cognitive pretesting, and expert reviews to develop a working guide, or toolkit, based on the model for academic and community partners to assess and leverage their readiness for CBPR. The 75-page toolkit is designed as a qualitative assessment promoting equal voice and transparent, bi-directional discussions among all the partners. The toolkit is formatted to direct individual partner assessments, followed by team assessments, discussions, and action plans to optimize their goodness of fit, capacity, and operations to conduct CBPR. The toolkit has been piloted with two cohorts in the Medical University of South Carolina's (MUSC) Community Engaged Scholars (CES) Program with promising results from process and outcome evaluation data.