Community Engagement & Research

The Community Engagement Program’s focus is to develop means of reducing disease causality in under-served communities by integrating, supporting, and expanding existing and developing new collaborative relationships between researchers and communities. This includes the following activities.

Partnering with various community constituencies to identify and address health needs by:

• Helping community-based organizations assess needs among their constituencies
• Providing technical assistance for planning interventions and evaluation designs
• Partnering with new organizations to expand community-engaged work, especially reaching out to English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanic populations
• Setting up mechanisms to share research results with community members while continuing and extending our on-going partnerships and projects

Linking community members’ need for health promotion with community-based health care services by:

• Facilitating members’ access to sources of primary care
• Enabling community clinics to participate in health promotion efforts such as vaccine promotion or smoking cessation interventions
• Providing follow-up care for people whose research participation may lead to identification of a medical problem

Enhancing fair and equitable opportunities for community members’ participation in translational research by:

• Launching new initiatives to expand community-based research registry including under-served groups in research
• Deploying Spanish language validation system to expand research participation opportunities

Building capacity for culturally sensitive, community-engaged research by:

• Expanding training for Clinical Scholars
• Enhancing opportunities for pre-and post-doctoral students’ summer research and practica
• Facilitating and funding pilot applications for community-engaged research
• Providing consultation and technical assistance for investigators seeking to conduct research which addresses the three above-listed goals