Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

Worker with No Name Your name, hidden somewhere in the wood, cement, and scaffolding. Your dreams, erased from our public deliberations and analyses. Your desires, written over by Ours. July 17, 2012.

I will share today an example of listening from our CCA grant on heart health funded by AHRQ. On this grant, we have a very strong community partner that has tremendous community presence. We also have a strong media partner that has done a fantastic job with the production of the content. Our team collectively has a lot of expertise at developing and running large campaigns and doing community-based work. In spite of all this expertise, one part of our community-driven work in one of the Counties hit a major roadblock because the media partner did not end up inviting the local leadership (state representatives, legislators, Black caucus, mayor's office) to our press launch in spite of being told consistently by the community organizer as well as by the Purdue team that this was very important. It turns out that one of the key leaders, a state representative, a champion of health inequities and health disparities work from the County called up our community partner and expressed h...

So July is here, and the move has finally been completed! After awaiting with excitement for all these months, saying our goodbyes to friends, collaborators, community organizers, community partners, and students at Purdue, we have finally arrived in Singapore, and are starting to settle in. So the work of the "Center for Culture-centered Approach to Research and Evaluation" (CARE) has also begun. This blogsite will gradually turn into the primary blog site for CARE, connecting the CARE projects with ongoing CCA projects elsewhere across the globe and gradually emerging into a resource for community members, community organizers, activists, policy makers, and program planners in engaging the culture-centered approach (CCA). As I consider the origins of the CCA, I go back to the inspirations for CCA that I had received from primarily reading the work of Collins Airhihenbuwa . Collins had written a book, " Health and Culture: Beyond the Western Paradigm " and I...