Table 3.

Illustrative quotes that highlight key themes related to NWP implementation, sustainability, and impact

Funding	“The big thing that I don’t like is that we don’t have the funds we need…many of our projects don’t have resources they need in order to do the programs we need to do. …if we had better funding we could train more women and we would have more women to get out and do this work. And women get burned out… if you are the only two or three ladies that are doing it then you soon get burned out but if you could get more women involved and that requires funding then it would help our programs to grow.” “… I don’t like that I get discouraged finding money to sustain our programs or lose programs more often than we should…it’s just not supported around the country”
Partnerships	“… the Witness Project as an organization would be able to help a person to get transitioned into or gain access because they partner a lot of times with a lot of the resource fairs… there will be another component of the cancer center that will come out with their bus, with their equipment the mammogram do free mammography and different things like that. So there we’re fortunate in that we have a partnership with a cancer research hospital where there may be some of those resources that are available that we would have influence with.” “We are aspiring to be more and more involved and collaborating with other health agencies and many times that information is not available to us but we are beginning to know what agencies are available and how we can refer people to the different agencies for whatever their needs may be.”
Leadership/program champion	“…folks don’t always understand that you’ve got to have a leader you have got to have someone giving direction. You have got to have nationally giving direction you have to have administratively someone giving direction to get the volunteers out there doing what they need to do and doing it effectively.” “First of all I would say it’s XX and XX…they are committed, they have a good vision, they do whatever needs to be done and they get it done. They have a wonderful network of people that they’ve connected with to provide a greater, a broader level of support than just two people can provide.”
LHA staffing and commitment	“What makes it successful, because you have dedicated people…they are concerned about people and the goal is to let people know that there is life after cancer. You don’t have to crawl up in your bed and die, life is after, there is life after cancer and there is a good a quality to life after cancer.” “I love the revelation that comes from doing this kind of work, I like to see the light come on for people.” “I had lost two family members to cancer and I know how devastating the disease is…I guess this is kind of my outlet and my way to give back to the community…” “I have become a better person from it and I plan to be a Lay Health Advisor for a very long time.” “It’s one thing, I think on paper, to just provide outreach screening and insurance support for people. The emotional side of what happens to someone who has to deal with having cancer, recovering from it, counting every anniversary that you have that you are cancer free watching other people die from it is just huge, and we should not be expecting women to deal with this in full isolation. So having a group, a support group, a place where you can go and talk and share, and even just sometimes to vent about how hard it is or how happy you are to be a survivor is I think critically important in terms of emotionally surviving.”
Perceived need and fit of the program in African-American community	“Well first of all I felt that our community, the African American community, is not informed enough about what is going on in the community and I feel that also that we are more trusting of our own people when they bring information to us so that is one of the reasons why I got involved, I felt that you know we weren’t…the fact that the African American community was just not being informed or not listening as they should to information that could save their lives.” “I like the sense of sisterhood, I like that especially that is women of color because like I said in our community often we do not take [care] of ourselves or we take care of ourselves last and that we are just helping one another to become more and better informed about our health.”
Organizational infrastructure	“We don’t have an office space that we can have our own materials laid out when we do programs, make it easy access to, to load up everything and have regular meetings. The hospital provides us with a place to meet, that having a space of our own, but those are the logistical things.” “We just happened to have a funder who came and said we are going to fund you but we want you to get your infrastructure and the important thing this year is your infrastructure. So we are on two paths…I have volunteers who are on the program path and I, with our funder, are on the administrative path and the infrastructure part…we have to create our structure and so we are just in the midst of doing it.”
Implementation processes	“I think the self sustainability of the volunteers training each other and training other people who train other people just the fact that it is a volunteer power house, it is definitely something that people want to do, it is not necessarily imposed and I feel like that is a very critical way for people to stand by because they want to and they are in it because of you know just their own free will and I feel like that’s just a really good aspect of the self sustainability of the program.”
Broader impact	“I remember years ago I was ashamed to and afraid to talk to people and the audience of people I will be scared to death to speak and I think by being a part of Witness it keeps giving me strength to be able to go and stand before an audience of people and talk. Now I am not scared, I am not ashamed, I am not any of those things I used to be years ago, and each time I do it, it just keeps on giving me more strength to be able to stand out there and say things.” “I like the fact that I help save lives I like the fact that I try as hard as I can to accomplish a mission given to me and I like the fact that what I have and what I am can translate into helping someone else, giving someone else a float. It’s like reaching out to someone who has fallen overboard that’s how I feel about it and all you have to do is make contact with a finger and pull them back to shore.” “So it has helped me gain not only this boldness, boldness to be able to share, to educate so I think it really has helped me in the communication skills and just being able to get up and speak in front of a large audience, large or small.” “We genuinely care about each other it’s not just a job it is something that is meaningful it’s not just something that we do for the sake of doing something. But it’s something meaningful.”