Communities Matter: Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR) in Action for Building Breastfeeding Supportive Communities

Communities are the next frontier for building a constellation of support for breastfeeding. Using a high-impact CPPR model, the First Food Friendly Community Initiative (3FCI), a pilot project of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, combines a proprietary community assessment tool, with community-partnered curriculum development and job skills training to reduce local social stressors that are barriers to breastfeeding while creating a nationally replicable model of community accreditation. This process, being piloted in Detroit and Philadelphia, focuses on true community engagement, local messaging and community-led research and execution. The session will include outcomes and findings from the Detroit and Philadelphia projects and highlight key strategies for effectively assessing and engaging communities for breastfeeding support. 3FCI also adds to a critical body of evidence needed to explore the connections between breastfeeding support and family economic strengthening, while developing a national accreditation model that moves from “checklist” to community-sourced solutions.