Creating Community Capacity to Reduce Health Disparities 

TPI Home Page

Welcome to the Center for Community Health website.  As part of the Texas Prevention Institute, we focus on the following goals:

• Work collaboratively with the community
• Facilitate interdisciplinary, policy-relevant research
• Translate research into practice and policy
• Enhance community capacity for prevention
• Improve population health with a special focus on vulnerable populations
• Eliminate health disparities
• Build trust in the community

At the heart of every endeavor of the Center for Community Health is the concept of health equity through community empowerment.  Broadly defined, a community encompasses not only geographic areas, but also social, religious, political, and economic alliances. It is through these alliances that members derive a sense of belonging from one or more shared characteristics. Empowerment is the ability of a community to gain control and generate positive changes in individual lives and their environments. It is through community empowerment that we hope to sustain health equity for especially vulnerable populations.

We hope you will visit our page often to learn more about our projects in the DFW community and see how the CBPR approach to research can make a difference in the lives of our communites.  To see a complete list of our current and past research projects, please click on the Research Projects link in the sidebar.

NEW GRANT AWARD!!

The Transforming Texas Program, a 5-year project, is part of the national Community Transformation Grant (CTG) program through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).  The Center for Community Health will conduct the evaluation of the Transforming Texas Program.  The CTG program focuses on the implementation of interventions in four strategic areas (“Strategic Directions”) aligning with progress in the following four performance measures outlined in the Affordable Care Act: 1) changes in weight, 2) changes in proper nutrition, 3) changes in physical activity, and 4) changes in prevalence of tobacco use. The Transforming Texas Program was awarded to the Texas Department of State Health Services, and is unique among the national Community Transformation Grant (CTG) contractors, as it includes 18 organizations with whom the Texas Department of State Health Services has contracted. These organizations include in their scopes of work 30 counties across Texas, representing more than 3.6 million Texans living in  urban, rural, frontier, and border counties spanning the 268,820 square miles of the state.