Administrative Core

ADMINISTRATIVE CORE PROJECT SUMMARY The Administrative Core of the proposed Center, Expanding Access and Accelerating Delivery of Interventions to Promote Mental Health for Underserved Adolescents (ACCESS center), will serve as the leadership and coordination hub for the center. Our goal is to integrate and extend the reach of activities across center cores, projects, and pilots to fuel transformative change in school-based mental health. Our interdisciplinary team has a decades-long history of partnering with school systems across the country to promote youth mental health through dissemination of evidenced-based prevention. By engaging school partners to conduct a program of thematically integrated T2 translational research, prevention services, training, and dissemination activities that support youth mental health, the Administrative Core will support the optimization of school-based mental health interventions for adolescents. The core will organize a team of interdisciplinary Established Scientists, Early Career Scholars, community partners and advisors, and Scientific Advisory Board members to come together in ways that actively promote the reach and acceleration of school- based mental health interventions through synergy across the Signature Project, three Research Projects, a Methods Core, and a set of pilot studies. The core’s specific aims include: (1) leadership, coordination, integration, evaluation, and future planning for the ACCESS center to promote the synthesis of data, knowledge, and outreach across all center components, for both internal and external end-users. This will be achieved through a Steering Committee, a Scientific Advisory Board, an annual external evaluation, and four Committees (Community Partners and Advisors, Pilot Studies, Training, and Dissemination), each populated with Early Career Scholars and Established Scientists; (2) engagement with a Community Partners and Advisors Committee comprising 12 individuals with mental health expertise and/or relevant lived experiences, to guide center efforts to identify unmet mental health needs, guide intervention optimization and scalability, inform pilot study research topics, and guide dissemination activities to maximize the external validity of activities; (3) grow the next generation of scholars via a Pilot Studies Committee that will support 2-7 pilots per year that promote collaborative research opportunities and future directions that extend the center’s activities in innovative ways and a Training Committee that will support early career development via interdisciplinary professional development activities, including didactic training in methodology, design, and statistical methods; training in implementation science; and training in mental health and equity; and (4) rapid dissemination of knowledge via a Dissemination Committee to oversee rapid approach to data, methods, resources, and knowledge sharing, to promote near-term improvements in school-based mental health and serve as a national consultation resource.