Community Engagement Core

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Community Engagement Core (CEC) ABSTRACT The overarching theme of the Texas A&M Center for Environmental Health Research (TiCER) is “Enhancing Public Health by Identifying, Understanding and Reducing Adverse Environmental Health Risks.” The Community Engagement Core (CEC) will be the primary conduit for bi-directional communication between Center members and communities across Texas. The mission of the CEC is to facilitate communication of community environmental health concerns to researchers, while at the same time supporting translation and dissemination of environmental health research results to residents of environmental justice neighborhoods and the broader populations of stakeholders. This mission will be accomplished by addressing four key elements of bi-directional engagement. The problem identification element will focus on engaging communities to identify and prioritize environmental health concerns. The development of scalable tools, will focus on the use of citizen science, community design, and social media tools that can be used to scale-up successful research translation activities of the CEC to communities beyond our initial partners. The communication of findings and exploration of communication as an intervention will focus on the communication of scientific findings, as well as the potential for family-based communication to be used as an intervention to reduce exposure. The decision- and policy-making element will apply the research findings of Center members to the development of evidence-based policies in coordination with community stakeholders, enabling long-term improvements in public health. The leaders of the CEC have an established track record of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and community-engaged projects, including a Superfund Research Program Community Engagement Core, and are well positioned to transmit community priorities to Center members and facilitate the translation of Center findings to protect the publics’ health and achieve more informed decision-making across the continuum of stakeholders, from individuals to communities to policy makers. !