The Community Outreach, Translation and Application Core (COTAC). The Community Outreach, Translation, and Application Core (COTAC) plans to translate the Center's research results to be understood and used by non-scientific audiences; to disseminate children's environmental health findings using various media; and to apply scientific findings to the policy arena by educating and empowering community members to mobilize around environmental issues that challenge community health, and by publishing analyses of risks and costs associated with environmental pollutants. The long-term objective of this core's work is to effectively educate community members in children's environmental health issues so that they can better protect their children from dangerous exposures and play an active role in larger coordinated efforts to change policies that will help improve the environmental conditions of low-income urban communities of color. The work of the COTAC will build on the Healthy Home Healthy Child (HHHC) environmental health community education campaign developed and launched by the Center's Community Outreach and Education Core (COEP) between 1998 and 2003. Over 650 community members who took part in a survey and in-depth focus groups helped the Center's research scientists identify the most urgent environmental health problems facing their neighborhoods. The HHHC campaign will be expanded over the next five years to target practicing physicians, policy makers and concerned organizations in addition to community residents. Community campaigns led by West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT) will increase the capacity of low-income neighborhoods of color in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx to advocate for improved environmental conditions. The COTAC will also continue a successful five-year working partnership between Columbia staff at the Center and the Community Research Group, the Center's lead community partner, WE ACT, and a Community Advisory Board of nine longstanding environmental advocacy and health service organizations in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx (see detailed descriptions in the Administrative Core section on External Collaborators). This planned work has been shaped by feedback from community residents and organizations, through which housing-related exposures and air quality have been identified as priority concerns. Finally, COTAC will conduct risk assessment and cost-benefit analyses using the Center's research findings to identify the societal benefits of reducing various environmental exposures that are harmful to children's health and development.
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