Capacity Building Together: Shifting Roles for Research and Implementation in Health Resilience Among American Indians in Arizona.

Community engagement has become a leading framework for supporting health equity. The process of engagement includes groups working together to continually identify and erode existing inequalities to promote a justice-oriented approach to health and wellness for all. Missing from the literature is a fine-grained study of processes that occur between and among project partners building the foundation for ongoing trust and reciprocity. Our project, Health Resilience among American Indians in Arizona, brought new and seasoned researchers together to collect and analyze data on healthcare provider knowledge and American Indian resilience. Four years after the conclusion of the project, central members of the team developed a postproject self-assessment to investigate lasting impacts of project participation using what we call an "Iterative Poly-knowledge Evaluation Cycle approach." Results highlight the value of flexibility of roles and organic change within projects, the importance of a focus on strengths rather than deficits, and the identification of lasting change on project team members at all levels to build and bolster multisectoral scaffolding for partnerships for health. We present this case study to contribute to an understanding of impacts of community-engaged, Indigenous research projects on people who work together toward challenging existing systems of inequality for better community health.

Building a Narrative of Equity: Weaving Indigenous Approaches into Community-Engaged Research.

In 2020, global injustice has taken center stage during the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement and other social movements. Activists are calling attention to longstanding disparities in health outcomes and an urgent need for justice. Given the global socio-political moment, how can health researchers draw on current critical theory and social movements to create structures for equitable outcomes in health research and practice? Here, we demonstrate principles for effective health research and social justice work that builds on community-engaged approaches by weaving critical Indigenous approaches into structural project designs. Our project, "Health Resilience among American Indians in Arizona", brought new and seasoned researchers together to collect and analyze data on the knowledge of healthcare providers concerning American Indian health and well-being. Four years after the conclusion of the project, the team developed and created a post-project self-assessment to investigate lasting impacts of project participation. In this communication, we discuss the principles of defining and measuring the capacity to build together. This work responds to the call from Indigenous scholars and community leaders to build an internal narrative of change. While we will not present the full instrument, we will discuss building a strong foundation using the principles of engagement for planning and implementing justice and change.