Community Engagement Core

COMMUNITY ENAGEMENT CORE (CEC): ABSTRACT The Community Engagement Core (CEC) supports the Strategic Vision of the CEET to improve environmental public health in communities in Philadelphia and surrounding S.E. Pennsylvania. It engages stakeholders to identify environmental health problems and address them collaboratively. Bi-directional communication of ongoing Center environmental health research to community stakeholders and of environmental health research needs from community stakeholders back to CEET investigators is facilitated by the CEC’s strong partnerships with three major audiences: (a) target communities; (b) health care professionals; and (c) policy and decision makers. Through our “Target Community Model,” we first learn about the spectrum of community concerns and then address environmental health problems without imposing any external agenda. Our regional focus is on the aging infrastructure of post-industrialized cities e.g. Philadelphia and its surrounding rural communities in Pennsylvania. In our target communities, we focus on identifying vulnerable populations, including pregnant women and the elderly. The CEC actively facilitates Community-Engaged Research (CER) and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and implementation science strategies. We target resources to those most in need which we refer to as precision public health. The CEC’s Stakeholder Advisory Board, composed of CEET members and community stakeholders, prioritizes research questions with a focus on CEET’s thematic areas in which we have considerable expertise: Air Pollution & Lung Health, Environmental Exposures & Cancer, Windows-of-Susceptibility, and Environmental Neuroscience, which unify concerns related to the impact of extreme weather events on health. Research questions are often taken to the Translational Research Support Core for input on study design to be performed by the Center which may determine the need to engage the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Core and the Environmental Health Informatics Core. Our Target Community Model allows for long-term and comprehensive engagement to enhance the communication of environmental health information to improve public health. We seek out and engage policy and decision makers by providing them with science to support improved public health policy including municipal, state, and federal agencies. We actively translate and disseminate research information through publication and presentation to ensure that communities, health care professionals, and decision makers have the most current research information on which to act. We have presented research information to local and national audiences. Our CEC leverages multi-directional engagement regularly to expand the impact of our funded work and promote active collaboration for improved health outcomes. By collaborating with the network of other CECs, we have designed innovative community engagement tools and worked on projects with national scope and impact.