Community Engagement Core

Our CEC objective is to facilitate and enhance collaborations that are responsive to community needs, with the overarching vision and aim of improving community health and public health practice for urban and rural communities. Our stakeholders include urban and rural communities, policy-makers, environmental resource managers, and public health professionals. Key partnerships with community-based organizations, tribes, and educators ground and guide our areas of focus. We are a robust team with diverse skill sets in research translation and community engagement. In 2019, with new staff and incoming co-director, we engaged in critical reflection about the effectiveness of our strategies to-date and the strength of our historic partnerships. We continue to focus on air quality and inhalation-based exposures, as low-income communities in south Seattle experience disproportionate diesel exposures and eastern Washington communities face persistent wildfire smoke. Our environmental health programs with teachers carry our related work on inhalation exposures focus further with lessons on the health impacts of vaping. We are poised to deepen and extend our work through impactful projects, research translation and impact assessment, including through our enhanced focus on disaster research response (DR2). Over the next five years, we will grow our DR2 areas of work, fostering our community of practice and providing local, statewide, and national leadership. In addition to ongoing excellence in science communication and research translation, our CEC will also formalize a Community Responsive Research Lab. With the development of this resource, we will enhance our ability to connect communities with researchers who can support community-driven projects. Throughout, we leverage our expertise and EDGE strengths to enhance environmental health literacy and promote environmental public health.