Community Engagement Core

SUMMARY – COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE (CEC) The Community Engagement Core (CEC) is a vital part of the Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan (CEHNM). Since its inception, the CEC has promoted multidirectional communication between CEHNM members and the communities we serve, ensuring the Center is responsive to and aligned with community needs. Through collaborations with community partners, our CEC has engaged in impactful community-based research and dissemination activities on multiple environmental health concerns including housing, air pollution, chemical exposures from beauty products, and others. In this renewal, the CEC seeks to extend our work by building new partnerships and expanding capacity to address ongoing and emerging environmental health and public health concerns using community-engaged research and innovative dissemination and engagement methods. Community groups and environmental health researchers need to be equipped with the research skills and engagement strategies to overcome longstanding hurdles to meaningful collaborations that focus on community needs, leverage expertise and assets from community and academic partners, and jointly serve the goal of reducing health burdens from environmental exposures. The goal of the CEC is to promote multidirectional communication between the CEHNM and the community to ensure the Center is responsive to and aligned with community needs. The proposed efforts of the CEC will fill several critical gaps: 1) identify emerging environmental health issues in the New York City area; and 2) enlist environmental health researchers with a range of relevant skills and interests to engage in collaborative, community-based research with translational potential. The CEC proposes two main aims. The first aim is to enhance regional collaborations and networking in environmental health by establishing a publicly available database of environmental health relevant stakeholders in the New York area. Our second aim entails identifying new environmental health foci and opportunities for strategic action by supporting collaborative projects.