Community Engagement Core

Project Summary/Abstract Community Engagement Core Community engagement in cardiometabolic disease research is critical to further awareness and identification of disparities to develop appropriate and feasible interventions. The UC END DISPARITIES Community Engagement Core (CEC), in collaboration with a diversity of community stakeholders embedded in all Center activities, aims to promote cardiometabolic disease research that is reflective of community priorities, elevates sociocultural sensitivities, and is feasible, action-oriented, and translatable to communities. The CEC Community Action Board (CAB) will incorporate community expertise, including lived experience, knowledge of needs and assets, and awareness of sociocultural sensitivities that is critical for developing successful processes, and conducting meaningful research. CEC will work through strategic community-academic partnerships, near-peer leadership development, structured action-based capacity building processes, and a dissemination-as-action paradigm to partner with diverse communities, develop innovative research, disseminate findings, and make policy recommendations for systematic change to achieve health equity. The CEC infrastructure prioritizes near-peer bidirectional and cross-disciplinary academic-community partnership capacity building to develop the next generation of academic and community-based experts in community- engaged cardiometabolic disparities research. The CEC will provide critical community perspectives in selecting and reviewing the pilots and community catalyst awards, provide feedback on project materials for inclusion in projects, and support community-engaged research processes for pilot projects. Finally, the CEC will utilize and enrich an already strong foundation of pre-existing community relationships and community engagement mechanisms, including leveraging resources from highly successful community partnerships— between researchers, clinicians, community-based organizations, and residents—to spur discovery, new approaches to prevention, and the development of effective clinical and policy interventions to reduce risk, morbidity, and mortality of cardiometabolic conditions in diverse multiethnic communities.