Session: Ensuring the Healthy Development of Youth in Homewood through a Partnership in Community-Based Participatory Research (Society for Social Work and Research 21st Annual Conference - Ensure Healthy Development for all Youth)

This symposium highlights the role of youth engagement in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process to investigate the challenges faced by children and youth with asthma in one of Pittsburgh’s least livable communities. Asthma, the nation’s most prevalent pediatric disease disproportionately affects low-income, urban African American children. The impact of which is particularly profound in this region given its poor air quality.

Strengthening the existing partnership between the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social Work and the Homewood Children’s Village, a child-centered community organization; the Healthy Living, Healthy Learning, Healthy Lives (HL3) project seeks to better understand the causes of racial disparities in asthma and the related social, educational and environmental implications. The HL3 project mobilized six youth to address the asthma challenge facing their community by tapping into the power of their natural curiosity and creativity. The participation of youth in this CBPR process was a vital yet missing component of similar research. 

This  collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, establishing the Homewood Pitt-Bridge project, “Our Boys”. “Our Boys” is an initiative to improve the social and academic development of youth at-risk in Homewood, while simultaneously creating a youth-led, pilot intervention to address childhood asthma. This process goes beyond other CBPR projects to engage youth in research to help design a relevant and culturally specific intervention.   

Our symposium presents the following:

1) Conceptualizing the Problem: The Social, Educational and Environmental Risks Factors Placing Youth At-Risk in Homewood describes the contextual factors of the community, school, and classroom environment that adversely affect youth academic performance and health outcomes.  We focus on the lived experiences of our youth in the context of failing educational and health systems. We call for engaging youth in the CBPR approach as researchers.  

2) Mobilizing Youth, Partnering with Our Boys: Our Curriculum on Training Youth At-Risk Community-Based Participatory Research presents our process and the related 17-week curriculum used to improve asthma awareness among Homewood high school students. We aim to develop leadership, communication, teamwork, and research skills. Each student was involved in over 75 hours of community engagement work to conduct this CBPR project.

3) The Tales of Our Six Boys: Findings on the Self-Esteem and Confidence of “Our Boys” highlights the preliminary findings particularly the progress these youth from a distress community made during this research project using self-esteem and self-confidence pre/post assessments. We also describe their social, intellectual, and academic development over the course of the intervention measured by: (1) critical thinking in everyday life scale; (2) sense of coherence orientation to life questionnaire; and (3) a brief interview to assess qualitatively the social, educational and community environment in Homewood.

4) Moving Youth-Led Partnerships Forward in Community-Based Participatory Research: Lessons Learned in Asthma Research seeks to examine the strengths and opportunities for improvement in youth-involved CBPR partnerships. In particular, we explore what researchers gained from understanding the complexities of asthma from their perspective. We also recommend ways to improve youth-led intervention for replication in future partnerships with youth and community-engaged researchers.