Core C: Community Outreach and Engagement

Project Summary/Abstract As a part of the UCSF SPORE, the goal of the Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) Core is to ensure that all activities within the SPORE are responsive and relevant to communities’ lived experiences and will ultimately advance cancer health within the SPORE’s catchment area and beyond. Working with an experienced Community Advisory Board (CAB), this will be accomplished through three broad aims: (1) catalyze collaborations between SPORE researcher and communities through activities to promote synergistic interactions, build community capacity for engaging in translational research, and identify opportunities for impactful dissemination; (2) identify barriers and facilitators of participating in clinical trials in broad populations through applying machine learning to clinical trials enrollment and population-based cancer registry data and ground-truthing results with the CAB; and (3) support research on external factors by developing a collaborative community-research framework and approach that reflect communities’ lived experiences and working with projects to ensure the approach is integrated into planned research and training activities. These Core activities will leverage the extensive infrastructure, capacity, and programmatic activities available at UCSF, including the HDFCCC Office of Community Engagement and the innovative and impactful SF CAN initiative. We will additionally leverage Core expertise in community-engaged research, machine learning and accrual of different populations into clinical research, and conduct of “cells-to-society” research incorporating measures of external factors to develop and disseminate community-informed methodologies. The COE Core will ensure these methodologies are applied to and support the projects, and shared across the U54 network.