The Outreach and Education Core supports the overall Project's goals of providing Rhode Islanders with a responsive center of technical excellence that takes a holistic research-oriented approach to resolving the complex scientific, engineering, and societal issues that arise during reuse of hazardous chemical sites. Effectively communicating potential health hazards and advancing the general public's environmental literacy are central to design of activities in this Core. Research translation activities for various scientific communities will be addressed by collaborating with the Co-Leader of the Research Translation Core. Taking a team approach, which will consist of environmental experts, researchers and educators, literacy specialists and community residents and stakeholders, the Outreach Core has five primary goals: 1) to create a flexible model for understanding environmental health literacy; 2) to bring an interdisciplinary perspective to solving problems of environmental communication, outreach and education; 3) to develop metrics for assessing environment and health literacy through a collaboration with community leaders, researchers and residents in a number of venues (adult education curricula, community events and activities; stakeholder training, etc; 4) to develop outreach and education programs and materials that will advance the public's environment and health literacy, and to engage them in informed decision making, to mitigate risk and leading healthier lives on a healthier planet; and, 5) to make an important contribution to the dialogue about environmental outreach and education strategies by designing best practice guidelines for advancing the public's environmental literacy about contamination and reuse. The intended audiences for this Core are community-based organizations, residents, health and environmental communicators as well as environmental and health professionals. Because of overwhelming and high profile contamination issues, and the majority of Rhode Island's Brownfield sites clustering in Providence County, we will focus a portion of each of the 5 years in Providence County. There is a recent land contamination issue in Tiverton Rl as well as a very active community advocacy organization there. We will add sites as circumstances develop.
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