Community Engagement Core

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Project Summary The rapidly expanding field of environmental health science (EHS) holds great promise for informing policy, bettering communities, and improving health. EHS research efforts are propelled by innovative and inclusive partnerships that engage the stakeholder groups who understand and can impact environmentally driven disparities, and an infrastructure designed to rapidly and efficiently focus teams on emerging EHS questions and opportunities. The heart of our P30 Center, the CEC, is a powerful collaborative accelerator, receiving critical input from stakeholders into Center activities and taking equally critical output—our research results—to communities. The CEC has united Mount Sinai's community of EHS researchers, experts in stakeholder engagement and diverse advocates, educators, clinicians, funders, policymakers, systems leaders and entrepreneurs to form our highly collaborative Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB), our infrastructure for groundbreaking EHS research. Over the past three years, we built the capacity to facilitate collaborative dialogue between stakeholder groups and Center Members to translate cutting edge science into prevention measures that reach and resonate with diverse audiences, inform policies, and act as catalysts for environmental change. We initially focused our activities in multicultural areas of NYC, specifically our neighboring communities of East Harlem and the South Bronx, which have high exposures to environmental toxicants and social stressors and disproportionately poor health. We have used what we have learned to further address national and international EHS concerns. We have innovated in four areas: clinical (exploring development of an EHS screener to link patients to local resources); educational (training dozens of inner city teachers to teach EHS/citizen science); community and policy dissemination (in-person through hosting summits, inner-city school teacher trainings, and virtually through robust social media, our website, short films, cartoons, infographics); and sparking novel partnered research (skin bleaching, crumb rubber turf CBPRs). We aim to continue our robust engagement activities by innovating: (1) clinical care by developing and implementing an electronic EHS screener for use in clinical care to identify and address EHS challenges for high risk children; (2) education by supporting EHS champions to translate and disseminate EHS research for diverse stakeholders who can enhance the impact of the research, inform future research and facilitate community-based research; (3) traditional and social media dissemination so stakeholders act on research findings, effectively identify EHS issues of local concern and communicate them to researchers and moving from research to action; (4) evaluation by enhancing the capacity of our partners to use mixed-methods evaluation of processes and outcomes. Promotion of community academic partnerships of this nature will ensure community concerns are at the forefront of research and will position our partners to be competitive for research grants. This collaborative work guides the selection, design, and implementation of future research.