Community Engagement and Outreach Core

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SUMMARY/ABSTRACT – COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE Nutrition involves specific nutrients and foods but also complex systems within a community and society that define what, why, how, and when a person eats. People living in poverty, and with the many challenges linked to poverty, are more likely to experience nutritional health disparities, such as obesity. As such, meaningful, bidirectional community engagement is critical to impactful research that addresses persistent, complex health conditions, including those associated with poor nutrition. However, despite its value, community engagement for many researchers is not easy, can be uncomfortable, is often not prioritized and thus not often done. The proposed Precision Nutrition COBRE prioritizes community engagement for all COBRE researchers, to enable a unique community-informed approach to nutrition research. The Community Engagement and Outreach (CEO) Core will serve as the bridge for Precision Nutrition COBRE researchers and the communities most effected by nutrition-related health conditions, in order to foster impactful research that is feasible and relevant to local communities. The CEO Core will be based at Hawaii’s largest federally qualified health center, with a long history of community-based research. Led by a unique team of community-based clinical and basic science researchers with extensive experience in participatory research, and a commitment to working with Hawaii’s community organizations and leaders, the CEO Core will be essential to the success of the Precision Nutrition COBRE. The Specific Aims of the CEO Core are to 1) Facilitate researchers’ understanding of the nutrition-related priority issues and concerns of the community, and the context in which nutrition-related health disparities develop and persist; 2) Promote the development of meaningful, sustainable, collaborative alliances between community stakeholders, community providers, academic researchers, and others in an all-inclusive nurturing professional development environment; and 3) Promote high-quality nutrition research that builds on and augments the knowledge/expertise of communities by helping researchers to appropriately incorporate a community context into their studies. This innovative CEO Core will provide researchers an experiential, first-hand framework regarding Hawaii’s communities that will, in turn, support meaningful interdisciplinary, sustainable partnerships and impactful Precision Nutrition research.