Community Engagement Core

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PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT: COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE The mission of the Deep South Center to Reduce Disparities in Chronic Diseases is to promote health equity and reduce the burden of cardiometabolic diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, across the Deep South. The Center will focus on the prevention, treatment and management of cardiometabolic diseases among Black Americans and low-income populations who suffer disproportionately from these conditions in this region. The Center is unified thematically through the application of the precision public health approach across the care continuum to achieve health equity. Precision public health, best viewed as “providing the right intervention to the right population at the right time”, acknowledges the importance of context, culture, individual beliefs and preferences to achieve and maintain health equity. This approach also highlights the need for equitable inclusion of non-academic partners to help translate contextually-relevant research into community and systems-level interventions. As such, the Community Engagement Core (CEC) of the Center serves as the central organizing unit for cultivating authentic, productive, and sustaining academic-community partnerships to promote health equity in the Deep South region. The CEC includes expertise in health disparities, community-engaged research, place-based research, health promotion, health policy, bioethics, communications, and research dissemination. The CEC will be led by Dr. Monica Baskin (University of Alabama at Birmingham) who will be responsible for overall programmatic direction and operations of the CEC. She will be supported by co-lead, Dr. Caroline Compretta (University of Mississippi Medical Center) as well as additional faculty responsible for various CEC activities, including Dr. Stephanie Broyles (Pennington Biomedical Research Center) and Drs. Vivian Carter and Stephen Sodeke (Tuskegee University). Core leadership will work closely with, and rely on input from, a community coalition comprised of various nonacademic partner organizations as well as a separate community advisory board including community members representative of targeted populations for Center research. The CEC will provide integral support for the Center’s mission to improve health equity and reduce cardiometabolic disease disparities in the Deep South by: 1) expanding and maintaining bi-directional academic-community regional partnerships; 2) preparing a transdisciplinary biomedical research workforce for the conduct of community-engaged research; 3) facilitating novel lines of translational research derived from bi-directional communication between investigators and community members; and 4) equipping community members with culturally-relevant health promotion materials, actionable strategies and new resources to improve health and reduce disease burden in the region.