Community-Engaged,Participatory Team Science: The TREE Center’s Impact on Health Disparities Research and Health Equity

TREE Research Framework

The Center’s transdisciplinary health disparities research is guided by the NIMHD framework, which provides a multi-dimensional structure for examining the complex, interrelated factors that influence minority health and health disparities. This framework emphasizes the importance of addressing influences across multiple domains—biological, behavioral, physical/built environment, sociocultural environment, and health care system—as well as across multiple levels of influence, including individual, interpersonal, community, and societal. By integrating these dimensions, transdisciplinary research enables a more nuanced and systemic understanding of the root causes of disparities, allowing for more effective interventions and policies that reflect the lived realities of affected populations (NIMHD, 2021).

The Center’s researchers include an integrative approach that involves 13 academic units that are campus-wide and reflects collaboration across multiple disciplines—often including the social sciences, biomedical sciences, public health, economics, urban planning, and community-based organizations—to understand and address complex factors that contribute to health disparities among different populations (Stokols et al., 2008; Warnecke et al., 2008; Kumanyika, 2012; Golden & Earp, 2012). This type of research goes beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries by co-creating knowledge with stakeholders (including affected communities) and aiming for systemic and sustainable solutions to reduce health inequities.

TREE’s Organizational Structure and Synergy

Our TREE Center was designed to optimize interdependent cooperation and linkages across center investigators, trainees, and a larger Community of Practice (CoP) comprised of university and external stakeholders. The Center leadership includes multiple principal investigators from diverse backgrounds and fields, as well as multidisciplinary leads across three cores: Administrative, Investigator Development (IDC) and Community Engagement and Dissemination (CECD). This synergistic approach ensures that investigators work cohesively rather than in silos, enhancing the overall impact of the research. The center’s approach includes prioritizing mentorship of early-stage investigators representative of New Mexico’s diverse racial and ethnic populations, supporting them in leadership roles to foster a new generation of researchers equipped to address health disparities.

Overarching Goal and Aims

The center’s overarching goals include establishing multidisciplinary research teams, studying interventions addressing health disparities, enhancing grant competitiveness for minority researchers, and building partnerships with community stakeholders. Through an administrative core, community engagement initiatives, and investigator development, the TREE Center has actively worked to create an inclusive research environment. The focus has been on developing culturally centered mentorship models and providing educational opportunities to increase the effectiveness and number of researchers seeking solutions to health disparities (Cruz et al., 2020).

The Center’s transdisciplinary academic-community team science specifically highlights the social determinants of health. The four overall aims were to:

Advancing Science “With” Communities

Engaging with diverse communities has been a cornerstone of our strategy, fostering trust and collaborative research efforts. Our research embraces a model of engagement “with” rather than “on” or “in” communities. We cultivate equitable research collaborations with diverse partners at the local, tribal, state, regional and national levels to test solutions and translate and co-disseminate transdisciplinary research evidence into practice, systems and policy.

Meetings with community partners across four New Mexico quadrants began in 2017, convening key community and tribal stakeholders with cross-sectoral expertise in behavioral health with grassroots to national organizational perspectives. Moving to action with CEDC support, the statewide Communities of Practice for Dissemination (COP4D’s) regional networks, implemented their own place-based action plans for dissemination and partnering in wellness, moving toward culturally centered solutions to behavioral and mental health issues. The arrival of COVID-19 shifted the Center’s focus to subcontract seed grants with “community champions” as the lead. Our impact has resulted in growing a statewide CoP Network (300+ partners) that is activated to co-learn and apply findings to systems and policy changes. We have tested our model of supporting community-prioritized research and practice and have unique technical assistance and workforce development experiences to offer.

Throughout its transformations, the TREE Center has also partnered with other key centers at the UNM, including the Center for Social Policy, the Prevention Research Center, the Center for Native American Health, the Center for Participatory Research, and the Clinical and Translational Science Center.

The Special Issue

In this special issue of Health Education and Behavior, we feature a sample of the work from the TREE Center. To build a compelling evidence base, the TREE Center’s core research projects focused on adapting, implementing, evaluating, and disseminating multi-level intervention evidence with long-term community partners. The extensive, deliberative, structured engagement within these partnerships has led to successfully integrating community and academic knowledge, community-centered and supported intervention processes, multiple key co-dissemination products and additional funding.

The Immigrant Wellbeing Project (IWP) partnered with four Albuquerque metro area immigrant-focused organizations. The IWP study protocol paper (Goodkind et al.) describes the theoretical foundation, study design, and innovations of a mixed methods study to reduce psychological distress, improve protective factors, and achieve system-level changes. The authors detail the development of the intervention, the process for integrating the intervention with existing community-based services, and the methods used to study the outcomes. This paper serves as a roadmap for designing and implementing community-engaged mixed method intervention studies to improve mental health.

The other major project, Cultural Knowledge and Zero Suicide, partnered with a pueblo leaders and youth. This work is featured in a paper (Tenorio et al.) which describes a 15-year Tribal-Academic (TA) partnership between a sovereign Tribal community in New Mexico and a university-based Division of Community Behavioral Health. The partnership adapted a community-based participatory research framework across multiple federally funded initiatives, including needs assessments, infrastructure development, service implementation, and mixed-methods evaluations. Projects were co-designed and co-led by Tribal members and academic researchers, with an emphasis on bidirectional learning, cultural relevance, and mutual respect. The major outcome of the TA partnership was the development of a culturally grounded community intervention, which integrated traditional language, lifeways, and intergenerational learning, demonstrated promise in building youth resilience and reducing suicide risk.

The TREE Center also trained 20 early-stage investigators by employing a community-academic mentoring model and competitive research program of pilot projects totaling $763,452 over five-years. Of the 20 pilot project principal investigators (PIs), 16 were scholars of color (two Native American, 10 Hispanic/Latinx and four Asian American) and 14 were female. The TREE pilot projects employed a range of research designs and strategies. Research designs included novel or adapted multi-level interventions, primary data collection and secondary data analysis. Intervention strategies included socioemotional support, strengths-based messaging and culturally centered approaches to health and healing with the goal of improved behavioral health and behavioral health equity. This special issue highlights just three of the innovative community-engaged pilot projects by early-stage investigators as part of a mentoring team of community partners and senior scholars.

“Latinx Youth Resilience: Lessons From Empowered and Community-Engaged Research in New Mexico” (Chavez et al.), examines how community-engaged, participatory research approaches can address the behavioral health challenges of Latinx youth in New Mexico, who face disproportionately high suicide rates and growing mental health challenges. The research highlights two distinct but complementary projects, both embedded within the TREE Center’s transdisciplinary health equity framework, that demonstrate methods for empowering youth and reshaping policies through collective narrative and civic engagement. The first, UndocuResearch pilot project used qualitative methods to center the voices of Latinx youth to enhance understanding of their experiences with institutional discrimination in the health and education systems. The second study, Generation Justice, used mixed methods to study narrative shift in the media by focusing on equity-based storytelling and wellness. Both highlight the role of discrimination and anti-immigrant rhetoric in the mental health of Latinx youth and the need to focus on multiple levels of the socioecology and resilience factors.

Werito et al. describe their work as a community-engaged research partnership grounded in a Diné-centered approach, emphasizing mentorship and cultural values in addressing health disparities. Supported by the UNM TREE Center, the study involved a collaboration between a Diné early-stage investigator and an experienced Diné mentor, who together worked with a Community Advisory Research Team (CART) across three Navajo communities. Using a CBPR framework and Diné-centered research and evaluation (DCRE) methodology, the team employed mixed methods, including surveys and focus groups, to assess community engagement, relational dynamics, and perceptions of well-being. The study highlighted the significance of K’é (relationships based on respect and reciprocity) in mentoring, trust-building, and co-creating culturally rooted research practices that affirm Indigenous knowledge and foster community capacity for health research.

The study by Painter-Davis et al. explores how health inequities linked to the criminal legal and juvenile delinquent systems (CL/DS) can be reduced through diversion strategies, emphasizing cross-sector collaboration and transdisciplinary approaches. The authors evaluate two case studies in New Mexico—one involving a partnership with a district attorney to reform diversion practices for youth and young adults, and another examining racial disparities in sentencing outcomes across jurisdictions. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, including interviews and secondary data analysis, the research highlights systemic barriers such as data limitations, fragmented institutional priorities, and siloed academic and practice domains. Crucially, the research underscores the importance of “preparatory work”—developing shared language, cross-sector trust, and inclusive data systems—to effectively implement equity-centered diversion. The partnerships among academic researchers, legal practitioners, and community members were central to navigating challenges and adapting project goals to reflect evolving social and political contexts, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and national racial justice movements.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the TREE Center expanded our transdisciplinary and community engaged team science. Specifically, we leveraged our long-term partnerships with other research centers at UNM and across the state to deepen the work of “place-based” engaged research with Native American, Latinx, African American, Asian American and LGBTQI+ communities. These partnerships involve students, faculty, grass-roots community leaders and anchor organizations in rural, urban, and tribal communities with the purpose of co-knowledge creation and production of mixed methods evidence to advance racial and health equity and data justice.

The study by Cacari Stone et al. investigates how U.S. state-level COVID-19 mitigation responses in 2020 were influenced by political partisanship and structural vulnerabilities, and how these factors intersected to shape pandemic health outcomes. Using publicly available data, the co-authors analyzed the association between political partisanship, social vulnerability, and COVID-19 outcomes across all 50 states using panel data regression models. Findings showed that higher Republican vote share was significantly associated with weaker government mitigation responses. Although increased test positivity rates also predicted stronger government response, political partisanship was the dominant predictor, explaining 54% of the variance independently. In states with higher and more unequal social vulnerability, COVID-19 cases grew faster, and mitigation policies were less effective. The study draws from collaborative research teams with experience in political epidemiology and public health equity and aligns with efforts from institutions such as the TREE Center at the UNM.

Conducted by a long-standing academic-community partnership, the study, “Community Resilience to COVID-19 Among Under-Resourced Black, Indigenous and Latinx Populations: A Mixed-Methods Study” (Cacari Stone et al.), used a mixed-methods design grounded in CBPR principles. The partnership included multiple university centers and local Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), with extensive involvement from community members as co-investigators and storytellers. The study included an 80-item culturally adapted survey (n = 1,215), qualitative interviews with 14 health care professionals from FQHCs, and 34 digital stories developed by community members. Data collection was codesigned with community partners, ensuring linguistic and cultural relevance. The findings underscore that fostering vaccine equity requires more than individual-level interventions; it demands systems-level investment in trusted community relationships, culturally responsive communication, and equitable resource distribution. The study illustrates how CBPR can generate actionable insights for policy and practice rooted in the lived realities of structurally marginalized populations.

The issue ends with a paper evaluating the TREE Center itself, and progress toward achieving its aims using an embedded participatory evaluation process to advance impact through three TREE Center partner surveys (Verney et al.). Survey findings demonstrated “high, sustained progress” toward achieving Center co-leadership, knowledge integration, workforce development, and co-dissemination aims. Furthermore, survey means exceeded national benchmarks on externally validated measures of community-engaged research processes and outcomes, including policy impact, community integration into research, and social transformation measures. Overall, evaluation survey results supported broad progress toward both authentic engagement and the co-production of community benefit. Results also affirm that, although complex to implement and sustain, publicly funded research centers supporting community engagement in team science, and grounded in genuine concordance, can play a vital role in advancing health and health policy with equity.

Future Outlook

Despite significant achievements, several challenges persist, including the need for continued workforce capacity building and mentoring of early-stage investigators. Moving forward, and particularly during a larger national climate of anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, the continued focus must remain on training the underrepresented research workforce for conducting health disparities science with under-resourced communities in the United States. Dedicated efforts to translating research into effective policy and practice to foster health equity is particularly urgent as federal funding threatens the continuity and sustainability of the next generations of scholars and centers that include academic-community partnerships and team science. By nurturing URM researchers as leaders in this field, we can pave the way for sustainable solutions to health disparities and create a more equitable health care landscape.