? Community Engagement Core (CEC) The overarching goal of the Community Engagement Core (CEC) is to provide effective outreach and dissemination for TRANSFORM's evidence-based and evidence-informed knowledge to grow the next generation of child maltreatment prevention scholars and reach a broad range of stakeholders in the child maltreatment community. The CEC will accomplish this in collaboration with the Overall, Administrative Core, and Research Projects through a cohesive series of activities focused on bridging maltreatment research and practice, expanding the pool of maltreatment researchers via mentoring and research training, and leveraging existing resources to reach large numbers of diverse stakeholders across child-serving systems. This target audience includes students, junior investigators, child welfare leaders, and practitioners (physical and mental health providers, attorneys, judges). TRANSFORM's CEC is fortunate to build on three highly successful existing research facilities at University of Rochester (Mt. Hope Family Center, Laboratory for Interpersonal Violence and Victimization, and the Susan B. Anthony Center), and University of Minnesota Institute for Translational Research in Child Mental Health; both institutions already include dissemination and outreach in their current missions and portfolios. TRANSFORM will leverage existing funding, but more importantly, existing reach and uptake, and extend current activities to disseminate work nationally via webinars, social media, publications and presentations at national meetings, as well as hosting summer research institutes and national and local events. The foci of dissemination and outreach efforts include: (i) a multiple-levels-of- analysis framework in understanding the impact of maltreatment on children (i.e., the importance of recognizing the impact of maltreatment on a broad range of bio-behavioral functioning across development, including epigenetic findings); (ii) evidence-based screening and interventions to identify, and prevent and ameliorate the impact of maltreatment on child adjustment and development, and (iii) systems approaches to working with maltreated/traumatized children (i.e., trauma-informed practice), across the fields of mental health, medicine, and law. The CEC will award pilot funds to junior scholars to launch careers, matching the award with a senior scholar mentor. The CEC's multifaceted approach brings to bear a new way of considering dissemination: a three-dimensional approach across multiple professions, geographical locations, and social media platforms.
