Outreach, Recruitment and Engagement Core

OUTREACH RECRUITMENT & ENGAGEMENT CORE (ORE) PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The ORE plays an essential role in achieving the proposed goals of the Columbia ADRC by meeting the outreach, engagement, recruitment and retention needs of the ADRC, focused especially on our local Northern Manhattan community. In the previous cycles of the Columbia ADRC, the ORE Core has successfully met recruitment, outreach, and engagement goals, including the recruitment of ADRC participants from traditionally underserved and understudied populations that reflects the diverse population of Northern Manhattan. In the current application, the Columbia ADRC will focus on investigating Alzheimer?s disease (AD)-associated biological pathways. Accordingly, we will prioritize the collection of biomarker data in the ADRC including cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and MRIs, posing new challenges for the ORE Core. To help meet these challenges, and to continue to meet the outreach, recruitment, and engagement needs of our local Northern Manhattan, larger New York, and national communities, we propose five initiatives: 1. Leveraging existing Columbia recruitment resources. Columbia has several NIH-funded aging and dementia research and clinical programs that we will collaborate with that have developed extensive recruitment programs; 2. Increasing community outreach, including a new relationship with the largest Heathcare Workers Union in New York, and the development of a new Community Advisory Board to assist us with planning and executing community outreach; 3. Improving metrics and data management. In conjunction with the Data Management Core, we propose to utilize a new registry of potential participants, including information that will allow us to determine the relative recruitment success of different outreach activities; 4. Exploration of the ethical and logistic aspects of return of biomarker results to research participants in conjunction with the Biomarker and Clinical Cores and the Columbia Center for Research on Ethical, Legal & Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic & Behavioral Genetics; and 5. Increasing community education by expanding our English and Spanish educational materials, especially materials on the risks, benefits, and information gained, by CSF, MRI, and PET biomarkers. We are confident that the Columbia ADRC ORE Core can continue to meet the evolving needs of the Columbia ADRC, including the continued involvement, engagement, and recruitment of participants from traditionally underserved and understudied populations, and the outreach and engagement needs of Northern Manhattan, the larger New York area, and the larger scientific community investigating Alzheimer?s disease and related dementias.