Community Engagement Core

SUMMARY – COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CORE (CEC) The Community Engagement Core (CEC) is a vital part of the Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan (CEHJNM). Since its inception, the CEC has promoted multidirectional communication between CEHJNM members and the communities we serve, ensuring the Center is responsive to and aligned with community needs. Our CEC is grounded in a deep, meaningful, and fruitful history of collaboration with our primary partner organization, WE ACT for Environmental Justice (WE ACT). Through these collaborations, our CEC has engaged in impactful community-based research and dissemination activities on multiple environmental justice concerns including housing, air pollution, chemical exposures from beauty products, and others. In this renewal, the CEC seeks to extend our work by building new partnerships and expanding capacity to address ongoing and emerging environmental justice and public health concerns using community-engaged research and innovative dissemination and engagement methods. Community groups and environmental health researchers need to be equipped with the research skills and engagement strategies to overcome longstanding hurdles to meaningful collaborations that focus on community needs, leverage expertise and assets from community and academic partners, and jointly serve the goals of achieving an equitable and just society where health disparities and environmental burdens are no longer the norm. The goal of the CEC is to promote multidirectional communication between the CEHJNM and community to ensure the Center is responsive to and aligned with community needs. The proposed efforts of the CEC will fill several critical gaps: 1) identify emerging environmental health and justice (EHJ) issues in the New York City area; 2) enlist environmental health researchers with a range of relevant skills and interests to engage in collaborative, community-based research with translational potential; 3) train community members to participate in environmental health research and translational activities; and 4) support STEM curriculum in local schools to build a pipeline to college and EHJ careers among local youth. The CEC proposes two main aims. The first aim is to enhance regional collaborations and networking in environmental health and justice by establishing a publicly available database of stakeholders in the New York area. Our second aim entails training and capacity building to advance environmental health and justice literacy as well as collaborative research and action in the community. As part of this aim, we will implement an Environmental Health and Justice Academy (EHJA) to train researchers, community members and youth on the tenets of collaborative research, dissemination, and policy translation. We also seek to increase environmental health and justice literacy of multiple stakeholders by broadly disseminating the voices, stories, and research of EHJA trainees through multi-media platforms. Furthermore, we will identify new EHJ foci and opportunities for strategic action by supporting collaborative projects.