Goals and Theme of the Community Outreach Educational Core (COEC) The primary goal of the COEC will be to educate residents in the Louisville Metropolitan Area (nine counties in Kentucky and four counties in Indiana) on the importance of interactions between genes, environment, culture, and disease. Our focus during the first four years will be the fast-growing Hispanic community of Shelbyville in Shelby County, Kentucky. This community consists of 4-8 thousand individuals, many of which lack basic social and economic infrastructure support and consequently, a group deficient in essential tools for promotion of a healthy community. As the Center matures and research programs are established in both the Hispanic and African American communities of Louisville, the COEC will extend its educational programs to West Louisville, another disadvantaged community in close proximity to a large industrial chemical complex, known as Rubbertown. These efforts will be complementary to those of the Integrated Health Sciences Facility Core (IHSFC). As detailed in Section 7A, the IHSFC will initially work with the more established and environmentally focused community-based organizations in West Louisville, with plans to increasingly involve Hispanic-focused organizations as they acquire a higher level of knowledge about environmental health through the work of the COEC. This approach will create a synergistic relationship that can significantly advance the Center's goals and its impact. To achieve our primary goal, we seek to empower the community of Shelbyville with sound medical and scientific information on the role of genes in health and disease, and how environmental factors and lifestyle practices influence health outcomes. We will begin by working with existing community organizations to identify community leaders who will be trained by COEC staff and, in turn, these leaders will train others in their community using a well-established train-the-trainer model (Ramos I., 2003). This approach has been shown to gradually build an environmental health infrastructure that can positively impact the community and its residents. The ultimate goal of the COEC is to build a self-sustainable educational program that persists within the target community after the intervention is completed. Modern theorists have proposed that systems thinking can be used to tackle intractable social issues, such as environmental health in depressed communities. Unlike previous social theories influenced by a reductionist approach to social problems (reminiscent of the approaches used in the biomedical sciences), theories developed through systems thinking incorporate the awareness that the entry of new knowledge may lead to conflict between those who are or perceive themselves to be at risk, and those perceived as being responsible for creating or preventing that risk. These social tensions must be factored into our community outreach efforts with the expectation that application of integrative approaches will enhance the quality of its products of the COEC.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 183 publications
