Community Engagement Core

ABSTRACT – Community Engagement Core (CEC) Medical and public health mistrust negatively affects health literacy, healthcare uptake, and research engagement, and exacerbates health disparities in HIV treatment, preventive care, and research, especially in the Southern US. Reproductive age women have been historically underrepresented in HIV and sexual health research, with consequent low access and use of the resulting scientific advancements. However, Southern US communities differ widely in the populations served and require individualized, culturally tailored strategies to reach reproductive age women who are at the greatest risk of health disparities. Under the leadership of Core Directors Drs. Aadia Rana, Deborah Jones, and Seble Kassaye, the STAR Community Engagement Core (CEC) proposes to systematically build trust in HIV research and its resulting scientific advances by establishing a unified community engagement hub that will support Community Advisory Boards (CABs) through strategic and collaborative partnerships with key local community-based organizations (CBOs) in the Southern US and create a bidirectional feedback loop between meaningfully involved community stakeholders and partners, culturally-representative research team members, and interdisciplinary STAR investigators (including ESIs). The CEC will also collaboratively develop innovative and culturally responsive research approaches for STAR-linked projects. To accomplish these goals, the CEC will first (Aim 1) establish and engage local STAR CABs and a national STAR CAB comprised of diverse stakeholders, leveraging STAR’s longstanding academic-clinic-community partnerships, thereby supporting the STAR cohort participant’s recruitment and retention and its proposed Research Projects, and second (Aim 2) promote community- engaged science within STAR through the development of Community Forums and Research Dissemination Events to facilitate bidirectional communication and feedback between community members, study participants, and STAR investigators on scientific topics that are of priority to the community and STAR scientific design, assessments, and future directions.