Abstract
Persistent health disparities among communities of color remain one of the most urgent and enduring challenges in the United States health care system (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2023). Despite decades of public health investment and policy reform, Hispanic, Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color continue to experience disproportionate burdens of chronic disease, limited access to preventive care, and historically inequitable representation in health research (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2023; Israel et al., 2026). Addressing these disparities requires more than data collection and clinical intervention; it demands a fundamental shift in how health professionals, researchers, and institutions engage with the very communities they seek to serve.
Community-partnered research and practice, encompassing approaches such as community-based participatory research (CBPR), community-engaged research, and patient and community advisory frameworks, offer a proven pathway toward more equitable and effective health outcomes (Israel et al., 2026; Joo & Liu, 2021). These strategies are grounded in the belief that communities are not passive recipients of health information but active co-architects of solutions to the challenges they face. This editorial, written by three health researchers with extensive experience in community-engaged work across Hispanic and other communities of color, offers practical guidance on initiating, sustaining, and maximizing the impact of community partnerships. Although the examples featured reflect work with Hispanic communities, the principles described are broadly applicable across settings, populations, and disciplines, including clinical practice, health education, and industry.
Why a Community-Partnered Strategy?
For health professionals, the value of community-partnered approaches may not initially seem obvious, particularly for those whose primary work context is a clinic, hospital, classroom, or research setting. Yet the core insight of this work, that solutions are most effective when shaped by the people who will use them, is as relevant in bedside care as it is in health interventions. Research consistently demonstrates that interventions co-developed with communities yield higher engagement in program participation, greater trust in health systems, and more durable behavior change than those designed without community input (Ortiz et al., 2020). But the logic extends beyond research: a clinical nurse who builds relationships with the neighborhood organizations, faith communities, or cultural brokers trusted by their patients is practicing community-partnered care, even without a formal research protocol. A nurse educator who co-designs curriculum with community health workers is applying participatory principles. A researcher who consults patient advocacy groups before launching a health product is doing the same.
One of the most telling indicators of whether a partnership is genuinely community-centered lies in something deceptively simple: language. Researchers and health professionals who consistently speak in terms of “I” when describing their work, “I collected the data,” “I designed the intervention,” “I own the findings,” signal, often without realizing it, that the community is a backdrop rather than a co-creator. When community members hear themselves described this way, or not described at all, engagement erodes. Partnerships that flourish are ones in which both the language and the practice of collaboration are rooted in “we.” That linguistic shift reflects a deeper orientation: the researcher or practitioner is not the central figure. The community is. In short, the question is not whether community partnership is relevant to your work. It almost certainly is. The question is how to do it well.
Take the Research and Practice to Where the People Are!
One of the most consequential mistakes a health professional can make is assuming that if a program or service is offered, the community will show up. The “if you build it, they will come” approach has consistently failed in underserved communities, for reasons that are neither mysterious nor indicative of a lack of interest: competing life demands, transportation barriers, distrust of institutional settings, language inaccessibility, and a history of being let down. And when programs do succeed in attracting some participants through this approach, they tend to draw a self-selected group whose experiences and circumstances may not represent the broader community.
Effective community-partnered work requires meeting people where they are, literally and figuratively. This means delivering programs in settings communities already use and trust: churches, community centers, barbershops, beauty salons, farmers’ markets, and school gymnasiums. It means offering services in the languages spoken in the community and at times that accommodate working adults and caregivers. It means hiring and compensating Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Patient Navigators from within the community, whose presence signals belonging rather than intrusion.
The gesture of physically going to communities carries its own meaning. In one author's experience conducting qualitative research in rural Missouri's Bootheel region, one of the most consistently powerful moments was simply telling participants: “I am driving down here to interview you, because you have the expertise that I lack” (Harvey et al., 2024). Time and again, that statement was met with appreciation, and sometimes genuine surprise, that a university researcher would make the trip rather than asking community members to navigate to a campus. The message it sent, that the researcher viewed participants as holders of irreplaceable knowledge, not merely as data sources, shaped the entire quality of the relationship that followed. For clinical nurses, this principle may translate into home visits, telehealth outreach to rural patients, or participation in community health fairs. For educators, it may mean designing coursework around real community challenges. The physical and relational geography of health work matters profoundly.
Examples from the Field
The promise of community-partnered approaches is best illustrated through concrete examples. The following draw on the authors’ own experiences working with Hispanic and other communities of color and demonstrate why the outcomes achieved would not have been possible through conventional approaches.
CHWs, known in Hispanic/Latino communities as Promotoras or Promotores de Salud, are among the most powerful vehicles for health promotion precisely because they are drawn from the communities they serve. One author's sustained work with Promotores in Texas illustrates this well (Castilla & Gandara, 2026; Lesser et al., 2023; Recto et al., 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic, CHWs played a pivotal role in not only connecting community members to needed community resources but also in providing essential education to the community about COVID-19. One example of these efforts was a CHW Health Equity Presentation that was co-developed, co-implemented, and co-evaluated with CHWs from across South Texas, that provided education to community members on topics CHWs believed were important to the communities they served. Topics included: Vaccine Information, Vaccine Hesitancy, Sharing Stories of CHWs Work During the Pandemic, and Local Resources. Each of the CHWs in this project identified sites to present in their neighborhoods and communities such as community centers, homes, immigration shelters, churches, thrift stores, and community parks. In total, 44 individuals in South Texas were reached from this presentation (Lesser et al., 2023). Because the Promotores on this project were trusted and lived within the communities they served, they could reach individuals who would never seek out a clinical setting or respond to a university-affiliated outreach effort. Their participation was not supplemental; it was the mechanism through which trust, access, and sustained engagement were made possible. Critically, Promotores in this work were compensated as the skilled professionals they are, and were involved in shaping the community presentation, not merely delivering a curriculum created by others.
A second example spans multiple communities and reflects the authors’ shared conviction that community-partnered strategies are not limited to research contexts. Earlier work involving community-partnered programming with people living with HIV, a population that included a substantial proportion of Hispanic and African American participants, demonstrated that health outcomes improved most significantly when the program was co-designed with participants, delivered by peer educators from within the community, and evaluated through measures the community itself identified as meaningful (Wigfall et al., 2020). Participant retention, a perennial challenge in health research with marginalized populations, was notably higher than in comparison programs that lacked this depth of community integration.
Yet another example focuses on a community of allies who are working to reduce the burgeoning burden of diabetes among Hispanic people. A search for local diabetes resources by Hispanic serving organizations led to the realization that diabetes self-care management programs were only available in English and held during 9 am to 5 pm hours. The people that the organizations served preferred Spanish language programs and could not attend during those hours, because they had jobs that did not allow them to miss work. Hence, the community organizations partnered with members of the community who were living with diabetes and a school of nursing to create a tailored program, in Spanish, that would be delivered on weekends (Enriquez et al., 2025). The ongoing project has been expanded to include a capacity-building component for stakeholders and community members/patients.
Across these examples, several common threads emerge. Interventions are delivered in settings communities already inhabit and trust; community members are compensated as genuine contributors; data and findings are shared openly; and the relationship between researcher and community is understood as ongoing, not transactional. These are not aspirational features of an ideal model. They are operational practices that distinguish effective community partnerships from those that, despite good intentions, ultimately extract more than they give.
In summary, the path toward health equity runs through communities. For nurses and health professionals in all settings (e.g., clinical, academic, public health, and research), community-partnered strategies offer not a detour from core professional work but a more direct route to its essential goals: health, dignity, and justice for all people. The principles outlined here - authentic relationship-building, equitable decision-making, fair compensation, meeting communities where they are, and sharing knowledge openly - are neither technically complex nor prohibitively resource-intensive. What they require is a genuine commitment to the belief that the communities most affected by health disparities are not problems to be solved but partners in solving them. That shift in orientation, practiced consistently over time, is the foundation of transformative community health work.
