Conclusions

The California Breast Cancer Research Program’s Community Research Collaboration (CRC) Awards are a useful framework for meaningful inclusion of women most affected by breast cancer in the creation, implementation, and reporting of research on breast cancer. Each CRC project achieved high visibility within its community, significant distribution of its results, and impact in numerous areas—health education/services programs, policy advocacy, and increased scientific and community knowledge. The collaborative nature of the projects was cited by participants as adding important value to most of the steps in the research project.

Therefore, our conclusions are:

  1. Community-based Participatory Research is an effective way to stimulate research in populations under-represented in breast cancer research.
  2. The CRC research projects funded by the California Breast Cancer Research Program (CBCRP) had positive outcomes in all the dimensions expected of
    Community-based Participatory Research projects: impact on knowledge, programs, and policies, impact on the quality of the research, impact on community agencies and members, and impact on academic researchers.
  3. CRC Awards were most effective at improving the quality of research (especially recruitment/retention and methods development), at providing benefits to the participating community-based organization, and at taking on questions important to the communities involved.
  4. For some teams, the CRC Awards were least effective at providing funding for community research subjects, leveraging additional funding for the research teams, impacting the analysis of data, impacting publishing of articles, and increasing researcher knowledge of the community.