CME in Barbershops and Churches Succeeds Only When Partners Come First

Community CME in barbershops, churches, salons, and re-entry programs works only when trusted local partners are in place before the curriculum is written. This week’s signal is narrow — a single provider-owned Write Medicine conversation — but it gives CME teams a concrete model for education that has to earn access before it can teach.

The curriculum is not the first deliverable

In the Write Medicine episode, the core point was not that CME should simply move into non-clinical spaces. It was that education in those spaces depends on who carries the message. The examples included HIV, diabetes, and mental-health programs in Black barbershops, churches, salons, and re-entry programs for formerly incarcerated people.

The design logic is different from a standard content-first activity. Before choosing faculty, format, or learning objectives, the provider has to identify who is already trusted locally, whether that partner has enough infrastructure to participate, and what the community actually needs. Cultural-humility training is not an add-on; it is part of preparing clinicians to receive patients who may have avoided care because of stigma, housing insecurity, incarceration history, or mistrust.

That makes this a trust-and-operations problem as much as an instructional design problem. It also extends a familiar independence question: credibility is not only about disclosure language or funding transparency. It is also about whether the community can see that the activity is being built with the right people. We saw a related trust thread in an earlier brief on proving patient outcomes, but this week’s example moves the issue into the partner-selection and care-connection layer.

For CME providers, the implication is blunt: if a community activity begins with slide development, it may already be out of sequence. The first planning question should be, “Who would this community trust enough to open the door?”

What CME Providers Should Do Now

• Audit one recent or planned community-facing activity: did partner identification happen before content design, or after the educational concept was already fixed?
• Build a simple partner due-diligence checklist that includes trust, community fit, operational capacity, referral relationships, and ability to support follow-up.
• Treat cultural-humility preparation as faculty development tied to a specific setting, not as generic equity language inserted into the activity.
• Where screening or community outreach is involved, define the outcome chain before launch: screened, declined screening, referred, completed referral, connected to care.

What CME teams should reconsider

The useful lesson from this quiet week is not that every provider should run programs in barbershops or churches. It is that some education cannot succeed as a polished content asset looking for distribution. For underserved or stigmatized populations, the activity may need to start as a partnership architecture: local messenger, culturally prepared clinician, referral pathway, and outcomes plan. The content still matters. It just comes after the trust infrastructure is credible enough to carry it.