Video Blog part 1 of our first trip to New Orleans.

Map of Central City, New Orleans

Tons of community-based participatory research (CBPR) authors and practitioners raise the issue of defining community in CBPR. Several authors in Minkler’s edited book Community-Based Participatory Research for Health speak to the centrality of recognizing and defining community (2003). In Lawrence Green and colleagues’ “Guidelines for Participatory Research in Health Promotion”, they argue that the first question that must be asked of CBPR practitioners is: “Is the community of interest clearly described or defined?” Israel and colleagues write that the first key principle of CBPR is “CBPR recognizes community as a unit of identity”. So, what is community in the New Orleans VideoVoice project? Sometimes I know and sometimes I don’t.

As we walk through the process of recruitment for our project, I realize just how complex the idea of community really is. For example, when we began, it seemed as if this was a pretty cut and dry case of neighborhood = community. In fact, one of the rare pleasures of doing CBPR work in New Orleans, as far as I’ve experienced it, is that many people really do identify strongly with the neighborhoods where they live. Many have lived in the same home, some for several generations. People seem to know the people who live around them, to go to church with them, to have attended high school with them, and many even attend regular neighborhood committee meetings. Well, that was, until Katrina. So, it’s complicated.

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