Background: Community-academic partnerships are increasingly used in interventions to address health care disparities. Little is known about motivations and perceptions of participating community members.
Objectives: To elicit community members' perspectives of involvement in a community-academic partnership to address implicit bias in health care.
Methods: With our partnering community organizer, we conducted one-on-one semistructured interviews and a follow-up group interview with participating community members to solicit experiences about involvement in an National Institutes of Health-funded clinician training; responses were organized using content analysis.
Results: Community members revealed that their participation was motivated by trust in our community organizer; they derived personal pride from participation in clinician training; the power differential between community members and clinicians in the training environment needed to be levelled. Our community organizer noted that the benefits of community-academic partnerships propagate to the larger community via community members' experiences.
Conclusions: Community members note trust, pride, and power as important elements in community-academic partnership.