After 3 years of collaborating, learning and growing, it is time to take CARDIS to new heights and expand the vision by engaging other members to provide support and infrastructure on our CARDIS Organization Team (OT). Following the goal of transparency, below we briefly outline how we were ended up being the OT, and what we currently do so, as a community, we can examine how to continue with CARDIS.

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CARDIS was convened after a talk that Ana Baumann gave with Rebecca Lengnick-Hall on dissemination and implementation, two weeks after George Floyd’s shooting. We wanted to recognize historical context and add a call to action to our D&I peers to be more explicit about why we believed the D&I field was born: if we are a social justice field, born to decrease the quality and research to practice gap, we needed to act – fast and better – as our Black communities remain disproportionately affected by anti-Black racism and widely continue to experience barriers to optimal health. A slide about that talk ended up in Twitter and several of our peers responded to the tweet stating that they wanted to talk and see what we could do as a field.

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A doodle was sent by Ana Baumann to schedule a meeting. Ana then called the other OT members, Cory Bradley, Rachel Shelton and Sarabeth BroderFingert (who had the idea of the meeting in the twitter-sphere) as friends, to help organize that first meeting hosted in June of 2020. Later that year, Pamela Denise Long and Atia Thurman joined us for a period and helped draft the CARDIS Mission Statement and helped mature our identity as a collaborative practice; the mission statement and an articulation as to “why Black communities” is currently in our website.

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After that meeting, we have hosted several others, facilitated conversations on racial justice relevant to our field, used group consensus to develop action items and affinity groups, hosted a summit in 2021, and continue to engage with our peers in the field to realize opportunities to continually reflect on and practice anti-racism through our science. Currently, we host Ideas In Progress with community members – the description and purposes of these meetings are in the website.

CARDIS has evolved during these past years and may look differently as it continues as a community of practice. We intentionally initiated a bottom-up, loose organizing structure because we did not want to replicate the inherent hierarchies of academe. However, we acknowledge that in order to expand the vision, a different organizational structure may be required, and so we invite our community to lead us into the next iteration of CARDIS. 

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In terms of the current activities of CARDIS OT, we currently: 

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 1) organize the large group meetings for community of practice (e.g. plan dates, organize topics/speakers, conduct surveys to help inform community priorities, set up logistics of Zoom and organize/publicize by email, twitter, etc);

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2) provide support and feedback to the action groups (e.g. meet as needed, provide input, facilitate meetings to larger group);

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3) provide financial and organizational infrastructure (e.g. website, pay speakers when relevant, have Qualtrics or SM, help develop and communicate vision/mission, problem-solve issues that arise, communicate about the group at presentations, etc).  

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4) facilitate recruitment and representation at professional meetings and events

In moving forward, we propose for the new OT members to:

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          1) have a commitment to and valuing of supporting collaborative learning practices that are   

           anti-racist and more specifically, address anti-black racism;

           2) engage with implementation research and practice;

           3) agree to some aspect of role for 2 years in some capacity.