Community Liaison and Recruitment Core: (CLRC) While overall US Asians are the highest-income, best-educated minority group, more Asians live below the poverty line compared to white Americans, are less likely to enroll in biomedical research, and are more likely than white Americans to experience disparities in many social and health outcomes. Perhaps equally important, there has been inadequate community engagement and support necessary to empower the Asian American community to be fully engaged in biomedical research. These impediments necessitate further development and implementation of sustainable and equitable partnerships among the Asian American community and researchers through collaborative research development and reciprocal transfer of knowledge and expertise to improve the health of the U.S. Asian population. Chicago is the ideal setting for this Asian RCMAR as it has one of the most diverse and large Asian populations in the U.S. Illinois has the fifth largest Asian population in the U.S., which is primarily concentrated in the greater Chicago area. From 2000 to 2010, there was a 39% growth in Asian Americans in the Chicago metro area, with a 40% increase living in poverty. Our RCMAR and this CLRC are founded on decades of our assembled investigators' deep engagement, trust, and research with a wide range of Asian populations in Chicago. Such substantial engagement and relationships will create the essential scaffolding to catalyze an increase the much-needed research and scientific workforce development necessary to reduce disparities among and improve the health of Asian older adults. To accomplish this, we propose a synergistic multi-level strategy that optimizes research recruitment, retention, and engagement through the following specific aims: 1) At the Community Partner Level: Build a sustainable and collaborative community steering committee connecting community and academic institutions for community-engaged, action-oriented health promotion research in Chicago Asian older adult populations; 2) At the Individual Community Member and Scholar Levels: Expand community-engaged research capacity among RCMAR Scholars and Asian community members through culturally-appropriate, community-tailored, reciprocal education and training in biomedical and behavioral research to fully understand the barriers, challenges, socio-cultural context of conducting research in and with Asian communities; 3) At the Individual Research Participant Level: Facilitate the recruitment and retention of Asian older adults, through an innovative, culturally, and linguistically appropriate research literacy support tool; 4) Translate RCMAR research findings at community, state, regional and national levels to inform practice and policy coordinating with other RCMAR cores, with National RCMAR Centers and other aging population research centers. Through these systematic, multi-level approaches and based on our deep community and ethnographic experiences over the last decade, our Chicago Asian RCMAR will begin to fill the dire gap in research and in the research workforce focused on U.S. older Asians.
Community Liaison and Recruitment Core: Older Asian Americans not only disproportionally suffer many health disparities, but also have many linguistic and cultural barriers in access and help seeking behaviors that further exacerbate health disparities. For too long, there have many ?parachute researchers? or ?in-and-out researchers? who do not establish trust and true engagement to sustainably build community capacity or enable reciprocal transfer of expertise and engagement. Thus, there is a deep void in the research workforce and research output focused on this population. Our Chicago Asian RCMAR will leverage comprehensive, cross-sectoral community support to build infrastructure to advance the health and wellbeing of a very understudied and underserved, vulnerable population.
