Perspectives of Community Partners Involved in an Academic Training to Address Clinicians’ Implicit Bias

**Published in Progress in Community Health Partnerships (PCHP) 17.2. All rights reserved.**
ABSTRACT Background: Community-academic partnerships are increasingly used in interventions to address healthcare disparities. Little is known about motivations and perceptions of participating community members. Objectives: To elicit community members' perspectives of involvement in a community-academic partnership to address implicit bias in healthcare. Methods: With our partnering community organizer, we conducted one-on-one semi-structured interviews and a follow-up group interview with participating community members to solicit experiences about involvement in an NIH-funded clinician training; responses were organized using content analysis. Results: Community members revealed that: their participation was motivated by trust in our community organizer; they derived personal pride from participation in clinician training; the power differential between community members and clinicians in the training environment needed to be levelled. Our community organizer noted that the benefits of community-academic partnerships propagate to the larger community via community members’ experiences. Conclusions: Community members note trust, pride, and power as important elements in community-academic partnership.