In recent years, community-academic coalitions have become an accepted vehicle for addressing health problems and inequalities.1,2 A coalition is defined as a union of people and organizations whose members commit to an agreed upon purpose and shared decision making to influence outcomes on a specific problem.3,4 Guided by principles of community based participatory research (CBPR), academic-community coalitions allows to pool expertise, resources, and perspectives of diverse stakeholders to achieve more widespread reach within a community to positively affect community health.2 Coalitions have been used successfully in the United States and elsewhere to tackle a number of complex health problems.2,5,6 Moreover, the literature is replete with information on how to build coalitions, why it is important, and who should be a part of a coalition.7–9 Still, little, if any information is available on the development of community-academic partnership coalitions using a CBPR approach to address older Hispanics health issues in Puerto Rico.
