Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core

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COMMUNITY OUTREACH EDUCATION AND ENGAGEMENT CORE: PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core (COE2C) enables two-way communication between the Core Center and community groups. The COE2C listens and responds to our communities who have concerns about environmental health. It communicates those concerns to our internal researchers, with the goal of informing their work and creating a platform for scientist-community dialog. One of our communities is composed of Native American Tribes in Maine who reached out to us to engage on issues of air and water pollution, as well as on issues involving how to explain, in a culturally sensitive way, the basis of environmental disease to their members. A second community is composed of the 22 towns in the Mystic River watershed in Massachusetts. These communities, some of which are environmental justice (EJ) communities, are concerned about water contamination from centuries of industrial activity. The two-way dialog with the CEHS, catalyzed by the COE2C, provides communities with important connections to scientific expertise to advise community members about their concerns. Additionally, the COE2C will continue to partner with health care professionals to optimize an innovative gene-environment toolkit to disseminate to this target audience. In the previous competitive cycle, the nurse community reached out to us to ask for such tools. Lastly, with funds independent of the NIEHS P30 program, the COE2C has created and will continue to develop other environmental health curricula in collaboration with research members; we plan to disseminate these materials locally and globally. The COE2C Director is Dr. Kathleen Vandiver who sits on the Internal Advisory Board of the CEHS. She will be responsible for convening the Community Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB) meetings and maintaining multi-directional interactions with the communities, partner organizations, and with all research members in the CEHS.