Established: October 2004
Principal investigator: Connie Kohler

The Flying Sparks project uses the intellectual imagery of Catastrophe Theory with the scientific underpinnings of Diffusion of Innovations Theory to create a model for relatively sudden and sustainable changes in community-wide health behaviors. Imagine the small flames and sparks that are the start of a fire – the first ten years of community-based participatory research in the Black Belt. Now, picture these sparks caught by the wind flying over large regions of the forest to create a catastrophic, even unpredictable, event, a forest fire – Flying Sparks, the next stage in community-wide health risk reduction.

Flying Sparks binds each aspect of the UAB Center for the Study of Community Health’s core research agenda which focuses on rural, isolated, and predominantly African American communities in the Black Belt region of Alabama. The Center’s long-standing mission is ‘to bridge the gap between public health science and practice in risk reduction across the life span of African Americans and other under-served communities and to determine the benefits of sustained efforts to build community capacity and to reduce risk factors within under-served communities.’

Flying Sparks dramatically expands the research gains from previous work over the past decade into a larger number of communities in seven counties in the Black Belt.

Flying Sparks involves conducting two complementary sets of activities:

• A program development and community identification phase, and
• A dissemination research phase.

Through this dissemination model, the Center will determine the extent to which these important gains can be translated into effective programs in other communities and what is the necessary community substrate for these programs to be successful and sustainable.