- Community Engagement Core (CEC) The Community Engagement Core will serve as primary liaison to stakeholders with whom the EHS CC members will conduct joint research. The EHS CC plans to co-produce knowledge with stakeholders in seven categories (residential communities, legislators, regulators, manufacturers, health care providers, pharmaceutical firms, and non-profit organizations). EHS CC members will conduct cross-sectoral multidisciplinary research with these stakeholders in order to generate actionable scientific evidence to guide a stakeholder decision that will improve environmental public health. The CEC will work closely with the Integrated Health Sciences Facilities Core (IHSFC) to move research through the translational spectrum. In many cases, the CEC will serve as the first point of contact with the stakeholder. The CEC will prepare materials to educate candidate stakeholders about the capabilities and resources of the EHS CC. The CEC will learn about the decision the stakeholder wants to make, the context for the decision, and the associated legal, temporal, financial, political, social, and cultural constraints. The CEC will then communicate this information about stakeholder issues, needs, and concerns to EHS CC members. We have assembled a Stakeholder Advisory Board and a group of CEC Affiliates to help us understand unfamiliar stakeholder cultures. When the Executive Team and the stakeholder(s) agree to proceed, the CEC in collaboration with the IHSFC will develop a Project Steering Committee (PSC) comprised of stakeholder liaisons and EHS CC investigators. The PSC will help select a research team capable of co-producing the knowledge required to inform the stakeholder decision. The PSC will lead and coordinate the project and will oversee research translation and dissemination. The CEC will work to overcome the boundaries that separate EHS CC scientists from each other and from stakeholders, who are experts in various non-science disciplines. We will help team members to understand each other's languages, traditions, perspectives, assumptions, needs, and values. We will assure that communications remain bidirectional and inclusive. We will apply state-of-the-art dissemination tools and techniques to craft a final report that stakeholders will apply because they find it credible, salient, and legitimate. To achieve these goals, the CEC will host Stakeholder Engagement Studios for EHS CC members interested in stakeholder- engaged research. We will collaborate with the Administration Core to facilitate development of Stakeholder Engagement Plans for all EHS CC investigators. We will develop an innovative Dissemination Toolkit with feedback from stakeholders to ensure research outputs are relevant, actionable and understandable. After the project, the CEC will sustain long-lasting stakeholder relationships that open rich channels of informal communication and improve environmental health literacy, both the scientific literacy of the stakeholders and the community literacy of the EHS CC. We will identify and publish guiding principles and best practices for co-producing actionable knowledge about EHS.
