Project REECH: using theatre arts to authenticate local knowledge.

Marginalized communities need to be heard and validated within their local context, so that individual and community support can be garnered and ownership of the concerns can be embraced. This article reports on three modalities that were used in the community outreach activities of Project REECH. The goal of Project REECH is to engage residents in low-income neighborhoods in a dialogue with researchers to identify the major health concerns in their community. With the aid of these community conversations, the goal is to identify and train community residents to conduct such community-identified research in their neighborhoods. This article primarily explores and evaluates the use and effectiveness of an arts modality called Playback Theatre. Also, it briefly reports on the use of Readers' Theatre and graphic facilitation to aid in the dissemination of the data collected from these community conversations.