During the period between September 2006 and April 2007, a team of five first-year graduate students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Public Health, conducted an Action Oriented Community Assessment (AOCA) with lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, and intersex women and transgender men of Wake County. An AOCA involves understanding the collective dynamics and functions of relationships within a community, and the broader community structures that

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... te health status improvement and well-being. More specifically, an AOCA attempts to identify and explore the strengths, needs, and assets of a community by understanding and integrating secondary data, and internal and external perspectives regarding the community. In this AOCA of Wake County LGBTQI-women and trans-men, Beth Bruch of the Lesbian Resource Center (LRC) and Jan Muller of Triangle Community Works (TCW) served as co-preceptors for the student team. In this role, preceptors act as liaisons and facilitate the student team's process of developing rapport with and gaining entrée into the community. Preceptors are also responsible for providing the team with advice regarding culturally sensitive and appropriate methodology and interaction with the community. Information gathered throughout the AOCA process was presented to the community at a forum held on April 21, 2007 in Raleigh, N.C. Several strengths and assets that characterized the community were presented, including 1) the ability to mobilize and offer support in times of need, 2) extensiveness and rich diversity within the community, 3) the support of several affirming spiritual/religious communities, and 4) several opportunities for action, networking, and socializing. The community forum also provided a space in which prioritized community themes (or needs) were discussed in small groups with the goal of developing action steps for positive change. All participants at the community forum were initially provided the opportunity to discuss the following broa [...]