Community Partners in Care Receives International Award

UCLA CTSI community partner, Community Partners in Care (CPIC), has won the 2015 Community-Campus Partnerships for Health Award, an international award that highlights the power and potential of community-campus partnerships as a strategy for health equity and social justice.

Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH) is a nonprofit organization that champions community-academic partnerships globally based on participatory research principles. Its annual award recognizes exemplary partnerships between communities and academic institutions that are striving to achieve the systems and policy changes needed to overcome the root causes of health, social, environmental and economic inequalities.

CPIC is a collaborative research project of community and academic partners working to address depression in the community, based on prior research on how to improve depression care in primary care settings as well as on extensive efforts to address health disparities through community-partnered initiatives. The organization works in the communities of South Los Angeles and Hollywood-Metro LA.

In announcing the award, CCPH praised the UCLA project's "depth [and] commitment to equitable decision-making .... Over the last 12 years, Community Partners in Care has held many community events where they have shared their partnerships plans and solicited feedback via free community conferences, trainings on collaborative depression care and continued meetings at the executive and sub-committee levels. Attention is paid to race, gender, and class and they instituted a creative method of addressing tensions via a 'mixed tape of people's favorite resiliency songs' during difficult times. These thoughtful and creative endeavors, not to mention Community Partners in Care's commitment to mental health care, were all noteworthy."

Read the award announcement here.