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IN THE COMMUNITY Asthma Program Seeks Balanced Partnership with Community Both Rosalind Wright, HMS instructor in medicine at Channing Laboratory, and Cynthia Piltch, director of research and evaluation at the Center for Community Health Education, Research and Service (CCHERS), believe that true community-based research involves an equal partnership between the academic institution and the community. As coprincipal investigators in the Center for Reducing Asthma Disparities, Wright and Piltch will lead efforts to study the role of social factors on the rates of asthma onset. Asthma rates can be affected not only by physical and environmental factors but also by social conditions such as exposure to violence and stress. This partnership brings together local community health centers affiliated with the community-based CCHERS, along with Harvard researchers, including Jonathan Levy, HSPH assistant professor of environmental health and risk assessment, and Louise Ryan, HSPH professor of biostatistics. The project is being funded by a five-year, $6 million grant from the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The equity of this partnership is established not only by the division of labor but also the division of funds: $3 million went to CCHERS and $3 million to Channing Laboratory. A portion of these funds will go to training community members in research techniques and terminology. "With this type of collaboration, we hope to give community-based research more credibility in the community, where people are sometimes wary of academics," said Piltch. "Many times, the results of community-based studies do not even get back to the community members, and we aim to change that by involving the community in a more active way. Community members will be instrumental in the development of solutions to the problems being studied." "We encourage more faculty members to look for this type of partnership, and I hope that there will be more funding to create the infrastructure for this type of research," said Wright. --Galant Au