Community Outreach and Engagement Core

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Community Outreach and Engagement Core (COEC) Abstract The COEC of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET) engages communities, health care professionals, decision makers and individuals in a collaborative process to select problems that CEET research teams and its network with other Environmental Health Science Core Centers (EHS CCs) can investigate to provide tools that will eliminate or mitigate adverse public health impacts to vulnerable populations. Our regional focus is on the aging infrastructure of post-industrialized cities and the new and unique challenges of rural communities in Pennsylvania that are undergoing rapid industrialization due to hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Many of the impacted communities meet the criteria of Environmental Justice Communities and are faced with significant health disparities. The COEC engages these communities through a "Targeted Community Model" in which we learn about community problems first and then tackle environmental health problems. The COEC has a proven track-record in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBRP) and developed a "Community-First Communication Model" in which results from CBPR are disseminated to the affected community first to empower the community to affect change. The COEC has used this model successfully to build translational research teams which utilize the resources of the Integrative Health Sciences Facility Core and its human population exposure group to design studies and develop a communication plan. The mission of the COEC is further accomplished through the following discrete aims: (i) use the Stakeholders Advisory Board to prioritize COEC activities; (ii) use our Targeted Communities model to communicate environmental health (EH) information in a manner that can improve public health; (iii) communicate EH problems experienced by our community audiences to set the research agenda of the CEET; (iv) educate new health care professionals in EHS to build capacity in occupational environmental medicine to serve communities; (v) translate and disseminate research information into public health knowledge; (vi) advance the field of community engagement by the development of innovative models; (vii) create and disseminate new education materials; (ix) collaborate with other COEC's; and (x) evaluate the success of COEC using logic models. The COEC team is led by Dr. Marilyn Howarth who has >25 years' experience as an occupational and environmental health physician and by Mr. Richard Pepino who has >25 years' experience in environmental policy and regulatory science.