Core C: Community Engagement Core

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Community Engagement Core (Core C): Project Abstract/Summary The Community Engagement Core (CEC) plays a central role by supporting engagement with stakeholders for all other Projects and Cores and is supported by the MIT-SRP Engagement and Translation Advisory Committee members. The CEC supports the MIT-SRP mission of creating and applying new technologies to predict the spatiotemporal dynamics of contaminants and to reveal their health impact in order to support Public Health. Central to these activities is the mission to engage meaningfully with local, State, and National agencies as well as citizens impacted by contaminants in their environment. The CEC will partner with environmental advocacy groups for the Mystic River Watershed communities, which contain three Superfund sites, as well as with environmental officers and educators working with five Tribal Nation communities in rural Maine, one of which is living near the Loring USAFB Superfund site. A bidirectional exchange of resources and knowledge will continue to be sustained by participation of MIT-SRP researchers in meetings and events sponsored by our partners, and in the case of Maine, with regular visits of the MIT-SRP Leaders to Maine as well as the annual three-day EPA Region 1 Environmental Tribal Summit. The CEC currently has two major Tribal Nation partners: Maine Indian Education (MIE) and the Micmac Environmental Lab. The CEC recognizes that culturally appropriate partnerships require relationships that can only be built over time, and we thus appreciate the support we have gained from our partners; we have built these strong partnerships over the past three years. Going forward, we will engage with additional partners to support other Environmental Justice (EJ) communities. For Massachusetts, our primary partner is the Mystic River Watershed Association and within their catchment area, we additionally will partner with the Friends of the Malden River to help attend to three Environmental Justice communities, Malden, Medford and Everett, which are impacted by legacy contaminants, including PAHs and N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA). The CEC will sponsor Citizen Science programs guided by MIT student interns to bridge the gap between researchers and community members. These activities will include using innovative sensors developed by Project 1 to detect target contaminants and sharing results with our engagement partners' newsletters, websites, and local newspapers. Additional engagement activities center around environmental health literacy, delivered through teacher training workshops, school curricula and informal venues, such as community events. New findings, as well as best practices, will be regularly shared with the public health community and other sister SRP Centers via the MIT-SRP website and newsletters. Lastly, to ensure a successful program, the CEC has also designed evaluation instruments to help the Core continuously improve its practices.