Community Outreach and Engagement Core

COMMUNITY OUTREACH AND ENGAGEMENT CORE: PROJECT SUMMARY The Community Outreach and Engagement Core nurtures and disseminates innovative work at the intersection of diabetes prevention and treatment and American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/AN) within a translational framework. Two distinct, but related strategies characterize our approach to achieving this goal. The first strategy entails strengthening current collaborations and establishing new ones with Native advocacy groups, tribal communities and their leaders, providers and administrators in the Indian Health Service, tribal, and urban Indian health care system, policymakers, and other research intensive universities. Our purpose is to sustain a research agenda of this nature, and to subsequently apply the resulting knowledge to the benefit of Native people at risk of or suffering from diabetes. The second strategy recognizes that health research benefits patients and communities only if scientists and health professionals use effective ways to communicate new findings across community settings and into clinical practices. Thus, we consider how health information is consumed in Native communities and explore creative ways to disseminate such information and research findings to community members, the health professionals providing their care, the systems responsible for these healthcare needs, organizations advocating for relevant policy, as well as interested researchers. These activities will build capacity for advancing diabetes translation research in AI/AN communities. Our vision is to promote the Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Diabetes Translation Research as a national resource that contributes to developing new methods, technologies, and approaches to disseminating innovative, goal-directed diabetes translation research specific to Native people.