Old North Durham, Durham County : an action-oriented community diagnosis including secondary data analysis and qualitative data collection

What would you say if you were to receive a phone call from a graduate student saying that she or he along with five other students were conducting a community diagnosis of your neighborhood? Perhaps, you would ask what a community diagnosis was; maybe, you would wonder why it is they think that your neighborhood needs diagnosing; or, perhaps, you would think that these students should first concern themselves with their own "community." You would not have been alone in asking yourself these questions. We asked ourselves these questions and many others as we began our "community diagnosis" in the fall semester 2000. Community diagnosis is a required course in the Health Behavior and Health Education Department of the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina. It is a two-semester course designed to teach students how to conduct action-oriented community-based public health work. During the first semester, students assess the needs, strengths and concerns of the community to which they have been assigned. During the second semester, students engage more closely with community members as they conduct interviews and hold focus groups in their community. Towards the completion of our work, we give back to the community what it is that they told us. This is usually done through a community forum. The following document reports on our work in North Durham during the academic year 2000-2001. The report describes the methods that we used in our work, the meaning of community for us, secondary data that we found on Durham and North Durham, and the data gleaned from our interviews with service providers and community members. The report concludes by describing our community forum and recommendations and conclusions from our work. We were not exactly sure where community diagnosis would lead us when the six of us were handed a sheet of paper with two important words written there on: North Durham. What does it mean? "North Durham County," we pondered. "northern Durham, the city," we asked. We soon discovered that it meant the city but we still wondered what parts of the city were considered North Durham. Perhaps, such questions appear easy to answer: we might only open a map of Durham and the northern parts would just pop out at us. We never found such a map, so we began to create our own through interviews, focus groups, and visits to Durham. Despite all the time we have spent in Durham and despite all we have learned in our community diagnosing work, our map of North Durham is still a bit of a fiction. It is not a fiction in the sense of it being false or inaccurate, it is a fiction in the sense that our map, our notion of North Durham is made up. It is made up from our experiences in Durham, it is made up from the individual experiences and social backgrounds that the six of us brought to our work, and it is made up from our interviews and conversations with Durham residents and service providers. Being made up in such a fashion does not make community diagnosis irrelevant or less important, it does, however, mean that we as students and researchers must be willing to recognize the partiality of the picture of North Durham that we are able to present to the reader in the following pages. Partiality may describe the picture of Durham found in this report, but it does not describe the effort or enthusiasm that we brought to our work in North Durham. It was an effort governed by our concern to conduct only ethical community-based work and it was an enthusiasm fueled by our desire to help make a difference. Our work in North Durham has come to an end but we hope not the friendships that have resulted. It has been a real learning experience for us and we would like to thank everyone in North Durham and Old North Durham for their time, energy, and patience. We would also like to thank our preceptor Wendy Brown and Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA) for all the time and energy that they gave to making our community diagnosis work in North Durham the success that it was. We would also like to thank our instructors Geni Eng and Sara Ackerman for their support, enthusiasm, and patience with all the questions and curves that were a part of work in North Durham.Master of Public Healt