Blackfeet Community College Center for Culture as Medicine, Administrative Core

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The overarching goal of the current Blackfeet NARCH application is to improve the mental and physical health of the Blackfeet Nation by developing the Blackfeet Community College (BCC) Center for Culture as Medicine (CCM). To realize this goal, the BCC-CCM must accomplish the center’s overall aims, which are to perform interventions informed by our previous research to improve the physical and mental health of the Blackfeet Nation, generate new results that will inform future interventions responsive to health concerns among the Blackfeet Nation, and build the capacity of health equity research at BCC by developing the BCC-CCM. To meet that goal and aims, each of the proposed projects of the BCC-CCM must meet its own specific aims. The BCC-CCM Administrative Core (AC) will facilitate the accomplishment of individual projects’ aims, thereby resulting in meeting the center’s overall goal. To this end, the AC’s specific aims are 1. accomplish the overall aims of the BCC-CCM. The AC will assure that the individual projects are working together efficiently by continually and carefully monitoring component activities and facilitating communications among them. As such, the AC is responsible for allocating and overseeing all BCC-CCM resources; establishing and maintaining partnerships, the Community Advisory Board, and the External Advisory Committee; and arranging meetings and other activities essential to the success of the BCC-CCM. 2. maintain good relationships with the Blackfeet community, be responsive to the research interests of the community, and disseminate research results to the community. We have found that the Blackfeet community is very supportive of biomedical research at BCC. This support has been best exemplified by the number of community members participating in past research projects and their pride in research being conducted by Blackfeet people, especially Blackfeet students. Each of the BCC-CCM projects is responsible for maintaining good relationships/partnerships with the Blackfeet community, and it is the AC’s responsibility to assure that each project does so. Recommendations and guidance, from either the BCC-CCM CAB or the individual projects’ CABs must be communicated to all center investigators and heeded. 3. build a sustainable BCC-CCM. The most impactful result of NARCH funding would be the development of a sustainable Native research center. A sustained center would have investigators who could improve the health of Blackfeet people and compete successfully for external funding. We believe the previous BCC NARCH, by funding student and faculty research development, positioned us to be able to propose the present application. By continuing to publish, perform impactful interventions, generate published results that can act as preliminary data for future proposals, and build research capacity, BCC-CCM will indeed become sustainable.