Community Engagement Core

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PROJECT SUMMARY The Community Engagement Core (CEC) will cultivate and sustain productive collaborations and partnerships with community-based organizations to foster awareness of and participation in health disparities research among minority populations in Arizona. The CEC will use the concepts of Inquiry and Action to guide a four-direction framework to pursue specific aims of: Dialogue, Knowledge, Action, and Reflection. Dialogue (Aim 1): Guided by the Communities in Action – Pathways to Health Equity Model, the CEC will engage stakeholders (e.g., community-based organizations, community leaders, policy experts, and researchers) in guided communication and consensus building to synthesize existing regional “needs assessments” and health promotion strategies to yield a meta-analysis of challenges and resources to identify commonalities in health trends, drivers of health disparities, and assets nurturing resilience. Knowledge (Aim 2): Drawing on outcomes of Aim 1, the CEC team will increase awareness of health disparities research, and develop and facilitate regular webinars that showcase successful community-university collaborations to promote recruitment, participation and retention of underserved populations in health disparity research. Action (Aim 3): Community Coalition Action Theory will support mobilization of multi sectorial, public-private and community-based organizations to address priority health disparities research areas through implementation and translational science. These activities will occur in bi-annual face-to-face workgroups and will establish action plans building on existing resources and establishing clear documentation of resource gaps. Reflection (Aim 4): The CEC will use NIH National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Partnerships for Environmental Public Health Indicators and the Community Readiness model to collect qualitative and quantitative measures of communities' and researchers' capacity, resilience and readiness for collaborative research. Key outcomes will be understanding of roles in and evolution of partnerships, promoters of health-related resilience (e.g., community collective action and advocacy) and willingness to invest in health equity research. The anticipated outcomes of the CEC's application of a four-direction framework is a picture of the shared and distinct determinants of health in Arizona that informs a dynamic comprehensive plan and SHERC-community partnerships designed to affect action at the community, provider and policy level for health equity research, dissemination, translation, and intervention.