Outreach, Recruitment and Engagement Core

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PROJECT SUMMARY The Outreach, Recruitment, and Engagement Core (OREC) will be responsible for providing important liaison and outreach between the Cleveland Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (CADRC) and people with dementia, their care partners and both the professional and local lay community, so that information may be communicated bi-directionally. The OREC will be led by Dr. Martha Sajatovic, a clinical investigator with over 2 decades of clinical trials and research experience, with focus on community outreach and engagement of traditionally hard-to-reach or marginalized populations. To best meet the needs of the Center, the OREC must develop and maintain a robust pool of volunteers within Northeast Ohio, with and without cognitive impairment, who are willing to participate in the CADRC Clinical Core (CC) and other activities (e.g., clinical trials). The OREC will accomplish this through 4 specific aims. The OREC will promote recruitment and retention of participants in clinical research in close collaboration with the CC (Specific Aim 1). Both cores will continuously coordinate and evaluate recruitment and outreach efforts to identify the most effective strategies, develop new recruitment methods, and build even more extensive collaboration with community stakeholders and an expanded referral network. In Specific Aim 2, the OREC will focus recruitment of key subgroups, including African-Americans (AA), individuals with dementia with Lewy bodies and atypical Alzheimer's disease (AD), and cognitively normal controls. Taken together, these special populations will provide valuable new data on asymptomatic, at-risk individuals, and individuals in the earliest stages of neurocognitive decline. The OREC will leverage the existing Minority Advisory Board (MAB) to raise awareness of the CADRC within the AA community. Recruitment of other sub-groups will build upon successful funded programs to recruit from existing subject samples. Another goal of the OREC is to promote community education and communication, disseminate research findings, and obtain feedback that will continue to improve the academic-community partnership by engaging both the lay community as well as local and regional professional groups (Specific Aim 3). The OREC will aim to support all other members of the CADRC cores as it relates to linkage between the OREC and other cores. The OREC will facilitate communication between all cores, optimize outreach activities and help ensure that all cores are actively collaborating in the central goal of advancing AD research (Specific Aim 4).