Xavier RCMI Renewal Application--Community Engagement Core

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RCMI Community Engagement Core (CEC) Summary CEC, a Key Component of the Xavier RCMI Center is to facilitate meaningful community involvement to ensure effective and trusted bi-directional relationship between researchers and community. Expanded use of community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been noted as a “strategic imperative” to develop effective interventions to address health disparities. Community Engagement is an essential component of the research process. A review of the history of earlier population-based studies, in both majority and minority populations, indicates that requisite to a study's success is the comprehensive involvement of the study population's Community. The CEC will leverage the infrastructure and established community networks established by the Louisiana Clinical and Translational Science (LACaTS) Center’s Community Engagement and Outreach Resource (CEOR) Core. The CEC will embark on successful and impactful community engagement strategies and activities by addressing the following four specific aims. 1. Promote and sustain community-academic partnerships through bidirectional knowledge sharing to ensure that intervention strategies and scientific discovery in cancer health disparities and related risk and protected factors are relevant to community needs and translated into community knowledge and practice. 2. Facilitate greater community involvement in setting research priorities and creating more opportunities for academic-practitioner-community research partnerships. 3. Build capacity (knowledge and skills) among research investigators, community members, health systems, and potential research participants to conduct innovative and transformative research projects to address community health needs, particularly in cancer research. 4. Provide support for investigators for developing appropriate strategies to facilitate dissemination of research findings of the center to the scientific and community organizations, and lay communities. To effectively engage and communicate with the community, CEC will employ the CBPR principles and methods in ensuring the needs of the community are ascertained and addressed through research, health promotion and education. CEC will serve as a liaison between (1) investigators and community – fostering and nurturing a bi-directional relationship between academic researchers and community; and (2) internal (Xavier) and external (LACaTs) investigators – for purpose of collaborative research and mentorship. The CEC’s established trusted and sustainable relationships with the community will ensure its involvement of the engagement continuum (Outreach, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, and Shared Leadership).