NY-CHAMP Community Engagement & Policy Action Core

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT AND POLICY ACTION CORE: PROJECT SUMMARY The NY-CHAMP Community Engagement and Policy Action Core (CEPA) will bring together an interdisciplinary, multi-sector team in a shared leadership and governance model to direct our proposed center of excellence. We convene for the first time four esteemed community multiple principal investigators (MPIs) - Black Women's Blueprint (BWB), Northern Manhattan Perinatal Partnership (NMPP), Caribbean Women's Association (CWHA), and The Bridge Directory, with a broader coalition of community organizations, hospitals, academic institutions, and governmental agencies from across NYC and NYS deeply invested in maternal health. The broad goals of our NY-CHAMP CEPA are to assure 1) local community needs, priorities, and assets are the very center of our Research Center of Excellence, and 2) our scientific endeavors result in maximum impact as well as structural and policy change in ways that fundamentally alter the drivers of health and health equity for birthing people in NYS and NYS. To achieve these goals, CEPA will practice intentionality, reflexivity, humility, and trust-building to lead four aims that serve as critical foundation and scaffolding for NY-CHAMP's community engagement efforts. In Aim 1, we will provide a sustained platform for iterative community input and engagement across our research center through the Community-Hospital-Academic Research Governance (CHARGE) Board. In Aim 2, we will launch a novel community-led maternal health provider + birthing patient training program that prepares hospital actors for anti-racism, cultural humility, implicit bias, and racial allyship care; and prepares birthing patients for empowerment, self-advocacy, and activation. In Aim 3, we will conduct a locally-led, co-design process in parallel urban and rural sites with two safety-net hospitals of the NYC Health + Hospitals network and in two counties in upstate New York in partnership with the University of Rochester and NYS Department of Health, to set the stage for scalability for our interventions, findings, and partnership model. In Aim 4, we will facilitate community-engaged research dissemination, collaboration, and policy action for maternal health equity in NYC and NYS, including a novel community-led research capacity building project for an innovative virtual doula care delivery platform. These aims, and the NY-CHAMP goals they support, are perfectly aligned with the NIH's IMPROVE and UNITE Initiatives to solve and resolve the maternal mortality and morbidity crisis and reduce disparities for birthing people and families across NYC, NYS, and ultimately the nation.