Talking Wellness: a description of a community-academic partnered project to engage an African-American community around depression through the use of poetry, film, and photography.

Abstract

The design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of an enhanced community-engagement program that uses poetry, film, and photography at a film festival in south Los Angeles is described. This project is one of several Talking Wellness projects designed to develop social capital and enhance community engagement in projects designed to improve the community's capacity to communicate effectively about depression, to decrease the associated stigma, and to participate in the design and evaluation of research interventions. The high degree of collaboration in the development and evaluation of this community participatory research model is illustrated by describing the selection and design of the intervention and the development of the survey questionnaires used for data collection. The project is described from the perspective of community members involved in the process.