Community Partnership

ELEVATE CENTER COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP PROJECT SUMMARY The mission of the ELEVATE Center is to Expand our reach across Utah and the Intermountain West, LEVerage existing infrastructure, And Treat pregnant and postpartum people with substance use disorder (SUD) who Experience disparities. We recognize this requires an approach that upends traditional research structures, radically altering the parameters of community engagement and partnership. When working with historically and structurally marginalized people, research efforts are most successful when investigators collaborate with community partners and people with lived experience from the outset. This is particularly critical when working with communities with intersecting identities. Pregnant and postpartum women with SUD, particularly Native mothers or those in rural areas, experience numerous structural barriers to health and are the focus of the ELEVATE Center’s projects. Explicitly sharing authority over the direction and interpretation of the Center’s research efforts engenders trust, thus amplifying the reach and impact of results. ELEVATE Center investigators are engaged in long-standing community partnerships that center communities and people with lived experience. These long-standing community partnerships create the foundation for the ELEVATE Center’s Community Engagement Integration Core and the Community Advisory Board (CAB) embedded within the Core. Our strong partnerships provide a springboard for realizing our long-term goal of conducting community-integrated research that amplifies community wisdom and leadership to reduce maternal morbidity and mortality in Utah. The Community Engagement Integration Core will support the ELEVATE Center’s objectives by providing a central, responsive infrastructure that cultivates community partnerships predicated on co-leadership, community wisdom, and resilience. Our aims are to: (1) develop structures that amplify and coordinate community voices to create co-leadership in the efforts of the ELEVATE Center; (2) accelerate the maturation of networks between and across the ELEVATE Center’s community partners to facilitate innovative implementation of research and training efforts; and (3) build robust dissemination pathways and sustainability structures on the scaffold of the ELEVATE Community Engagement Integration Core’s infrastructure. Regular CAB and Community Engagement Integration Core meetings, virtual connection resources, coordinated trainee and participant recruitment, and capacity building trainings will ensure ongoing collaborative work across all participating Center investigators and our community partners. The ELEVATE Center’s Community Engagement Integration Core will centralize infrastructure, provide avenues for bidirectional knowledge exchange and community leadership, and amplify dissemination efforts. Collectively, these actions will maximally and sustainably reduce maternal morbidity and mortality from SUD in Utah.