Beyond Barriers: Leveraging Community Expertise for Improved Neurological Health among U.S. Resettled Refugees

PROJECT SUMMARY Refugees represent a highly marginalized population with staggering health disparities, driven largely by their social determinants of health across the displacement continuum. Peer-delivered interventions offer a promising scalable mechanism for addressing these disparities, whose relevance, effectiveness, and sustainability can be enhanced when developed with rigorous community engagement principles and practices. This proposal aims to leverage a strengths- based, community-engaged approach to 1) capture experiences of refugees with neurological illness; 2) adapt and test the feasibility and acceptability of a peer support intervention to inform a future robust trial; and 3) build long-term capacity for community-partnered clinical research addressing neurological disparities among refugees.