Community Engagement Core

项目摘要-社区参与核心

PROJECT SUMMARY – COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE Arkansas has persistent and profound cancer and cardiovascular disease disparities in rural low resource counties and among Blacks/African Americans. Efforts to eliminate these place- and race-based disparities must include residents who are most affected, in addition to caregivers, practitioners, policy makers, academicians, and other stakeholders. The Community Engagement Core of the Center for Research, Health and Social Justice builds on the solid researcher-community partner engagement history established by the Arkansas Center for Health Disparities, the Office of Community-Based Public Health, and the Translational Research Institute's Community Engagement Core at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. The goal of the Community Engagement Core is to maintain and expand a broad-based coalition of regional stakeholders who are engaged in partnerships that result in novel chronic disease health disparities research whose results are disseminated and translated to inform sustainable community and systems-level changes. The Community Engagement Core will create a critical mass of community-academic partnerships that have the skills and capacity to engage in research from idea conceptualization to translation of relevant research findings. The Core will expand its coalition of partners in the Northwest, Highlands, and Delta rural regions of the state through its annual Community Campus Partnership Conference, career enhancement activities and the Community Based Organization Capacity Training. The Community and Institutional Advisory Boards will provide consultations to academic researchers to facilitate new equitable community-academic partnerships that result in novel and cultural relevant funded research in collaboration with the Investigator Development Core. In collaboration with the Administrative Core, the Community Engagement Core will use concept mapping, geographic information system mapping, and community asset mapping to inform strategic plans for dissemination and translation. Our mixed-methods are grounded in the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities Research Framework, the Knowledge to Action Framework, the Integrated Framework for Community Engagement, and social justice principles. The Core seeks social justice by promoting fairness, equity and diversity in participation in research, equitable access to skills building and networking opportunities, and shared decision-making that builds trust, improves the utility of research results, and ultimately improves the human right to health. It is expected that the Core's synergistic approaches will result in research findings that translate into changes in systems, policies, and environments that eliminate chronic disease health disparities in our target regions and beyond.