PROMOTING HEALTH AND PREVENTING DISEASE IN DISADVANTAGED URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The mission of the CWRU Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods (PRCHN) is to foster partnerships within urban neighborhoods in order to develop, test, and disseminate effective strategies and interventions to prevent and reduce the burden of chronic disease. Specifically, the goal of the PRCHN is to partner with neighborhood residents and leaders, and the community organizations that serve the neighborhoods, to address significant environmental and lifestyle issues that are not only strongly linked to chronic disease (e.g., asthma, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, cancer), but are influenced by the conditions and resources of the neighborhood itself. Our multidisciplinary academic-community team includes experienced community-based researchers, local boards of health and other health and community organizations, neighborhood leaders, and community residents. Together, we will accomplish the following goals: (1) With our Network of Community Advisors (NOCA), develop a set of procedures to guide the processes of decision making, conflict resolution, and setting priorities; (2) Formalize and launch the participatory process for setting a 1, 3 and 5-year research agenda for the PRCHN through neighborhood-based meetings, academic-community retreats, topic-specific working groups, and NOCA; (3) Conduct high-quality, collaborative prevention research with community partners to improve the health of local residents and inform the broader research community; (4) Foster community-based prevention research among our faculty, students and community partners through training, mentoring, workshops, and pilot project funding; (5) Build community capacity for conducting and engaging in prevention and health promotion research by providing research methods and evaluation-focused technical assistance to our community partners; (6) Establish our Center as a comprehensive resource for public access to local data on leading health indicators and as dissemination center for prevention research findings; and, (7) Conduct an ongoing, rigorous evaluation of the PRCHN, to ensure that Center's goals are achieved on time and on budget and to contribute to the national evaluation of PRCs. The Core Research Project emerged from our collaborations with neighborhoods to examine the prevalent issue of poor food access and security. ELEVANCE (See instructions): 'he PRCHN will provide an infrastructure to enhance collaboration among a multidisciplinary faculty and our community partners in a way that draws upon all of the unique perspectives and expertise to conduct prevention research, develop and test innovative interventions, approaches and methods to address the health needs of our community.