Community Outreach and Engagement

The Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) component of the Tisch Cancer Institute’s (TCI) primary objective is to reduce overall cancer incidence and mortality within our catchment area. Our catchment area encompasses all five boroughs of New York City (NYC), home to 85% of TCI's cancer patients. Community outreach and engagement is a priority at TCI, with an extensive COE component that bridges the community with the research enterprise to inform cancer research and control efforts of particular relevance to the catchment area population to catalyze research in all areas of science. Under the leadership of Associate Directors, Drs. Melissa Mazor and Sarah Miller, the COE has established a robust infrastructure for community engagement and has flourished by fostering collaborations and achieving milestones such as the development of a user-friendly community-facing data dashboard, robust infrastructure for bidirectional research and realizing enacted cancer policy initiatives. Evaluation efforts are rigorous, ensuring alignment with community needs and in tandem with the three identified aims. The Specific Aims of are to: 1) Monitor and evaluate the cancer burden and needs within and beyond the TCI catchment area; 2) Engage catchment area communities in outreach, programming activities, and clinical trial enrollment; 3) Inform and facilitate programmatic research and policy initiatives responsive to identified cancer-related and community-driven priorities within and beyond the catchment area.