Community Engagement Core

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COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE: PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Community Engagement Core (CEC) supports the mission of the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC) through engagement of community partners in a collaborative multidirectional process to identify and address the effects of the environment on human health in Southern California (CA). The CEC serves as a national leader in and model for engagement with communities—especially those which consist primarily of Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander and African-Americans living under economic hardship and facing disproportionate adverse health outcomes from social and environmental disparities. The CEC primary target audiences include communities, primarily reached through community-based organizations, together with policymakers and health professionals to address: (a) transportation-related air pollution and impacts on health, which has evolved directly from key SCEHSC research findings showing air pollution to be one of Southern CA’s leading environmental health issues; (b) concerns about health impacts from goods movement facilities, including marine ports, railyards and inland warehouses; and (c) broader health and emerging air quality concerns arising from land-use decisions such as locating industries adjacent to homes and schools across the multiethnic landscape. Over the past 24 years, the CEC has developed a successful model to listen to the community and engage community-based organizations and decision-makers in addressing environmental health disparities related to traffic and goods movement in Southern CA. During the current cycle, we built on this approach to integrate novel methods to train residents and health professionals in participatory air monitoring, to collaborate with multiple stakeholders to assess and reduce toxic air emissions at a neighborhood scale, and to expand our engagement program to address growing concerns around industrial facilities across the region. We leverage traditional and nontraditional communications techniques such as digital StoryMaps, social media, and infographics to update stakeholders on current science and engage the power of communities to reduce EH burdens. In this next cycle we aim to: 1) Facilitate a multidirectional communication structure that fosters interaction, share SCEHSC research findings and engagement models with local/regional/national audiences, and increase SCEHSC investigators’ understanding of community concerns with guidance from our community advisors; 2) Build capacity of community organizations from environmental health disparity populations to respond to environmental health burdens and to address those burdens through community science and public policy; 3) Disseminate SCEHSC research findings to local & national audiences by utilizing innovative communication methods, tailoring print and web-based materials and resources for intended audiences, and amplifying our reach through social media, and 4) Evaluate the success of CEC activities through logic models and formative and summative evaluations.