COMMUNITY LIAISON CORE

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The Community Liaison core seeks to broaden the community-based infrastructure currently exemplified by relevant and credible partnerships with community organizations serving older Latinos and African Americans and promoting programs in healthy aging. During the next five years, we will expand our community-academic partnership to include organizations serving older Asian Americans. With the growing aging and ethnic diversity of our nation's population, the need to include these groups in health research is assuming greater significance. The lack of adequate representation of ethnically diverse and older participants in research is especially critical since these are the groups most likely to experience poorer health and quality of life and have the potential to benefit greatly from health promotion and health care interventions. Much of the literature on health outcomes and health promotion may not be applicable to these segments of the population because older persons and ethnic minorities have long been underrepresented in health research. As researchers working with these populations, this leaves us with limited evidence on which to base a program to eliminate health disparities in older minority groups. Community Liaison Core aims are to: 1. Advance research on the effectiveness of recruitment and retention methods among older African Americans, Asians and Latinos in social, behavioral and clinical research studies funded by or affiliated with the Center; 2. Enhance the recruitment and retention rates of older African American, Asian and Latino participants in funded research projects on aging by disseminating information on the effectiveness of recruitment and methods through didactic sessions and in the scientific literature; 3. Create an infrastructure for community based participatory research through a formalized academic partnership with two community organizations serving minority elders; this will enhance our ability to understand the determinants of health disparities from the community perspective and to increase participation of minority elders in research at UCSF; 4. Develop systematic models for evaluating community-based interventions using ecological, program evaluation frameworks that will identify key levers of change for reducing health disparities.