The Blackfeet Community College Center for Community Medicine

Abstract The overarching goal of this Blackfeet NARCH application is to improve the health of the Blackfeet Nation by developing the Blackfeet Community College (BFCC) Center for Community Medicine (CCM). The BFCC-CCM must accomplish the center’s overall aims, which are to perform interventions informed by our previous research to improve the health of the Blackfeet Nation, generate new results that will inform future interventions responsive to chronic health concerns among the Blackfeet Nation, and build the capacity of health research at BFCC by developing the BFCC-CCM. Each of the proposed projects of the BFCC-CCM must meet its own specific aims. The Administrative Core (AC) will facilitate the accomplishment of individual projects’ aims, thereby resulting in meeting the center’s overall goal. The AC’s specific aims are to 1. accomplish the overall aims of the BFCC-CCM, ensuring that individual projects are working together efficiently by continually and carefully monitoring component activities and facilitating communications among them. The AC allocates and oversees all BFCC-CCM resources; establishes and maintains partnerships, the Community Advisory Board, and the External Advisory Committee; arranges meetings and other activities essential to the success of the BFCC-CCM; and works with the evaluator to monitor the success of the overall program. 2. Maintain good relationships with the Blackfeet community, be responsive to the research interests of the community, and disseminate research results to the community. The Blackfeet community is very supportive of biomedical research at BFCC, exemplified by the number of community members participating in past research projects, their pride in research being conducted by Blackfeet people, especially Blackfeet students, and their participation in the annual NARCH conference held at BFCC. The AC’s responsibility is to ensure that each of the BFCC-CCM projects maintains good relationships/partnerships with the Blackfeet community. Recommendations and guidance from either the BFCC- CCM CAB or the individual projects’ CABs must be communicated to all center investigators and heeded. 3. Build a sustainable BFCC-CCM. The most impactful result of NARCH funding will be the development of a sustainable Native research center housing investigators who can improve the health of Blackfeet people and compete successfully for external funding. By continuing to publish, perform impactful interventions, generate published results that can act as preliminary data for future proposals, and build research capacity, BFCC-CCM will indeed become sustainable.