The overarching goal of the community engagement core (CEC) of the Border Biomedical Research Center for Hispanic Cancer Health Disparities (BBRC-HCHD) is to reduce and eliminate Hispanic cancer health disparities through collaborative partnership, community based participatory research and dissemination strategies. The CEC was established over four years ago to foster integrative research, translate and disseminate findings, and to partner with the RCMI RTRN. Since then, the CEC has been developing and nurturing bidirectional community partnerships to facilitate the translation of scientific findings, maximize resources, and increase the community?s capacity for research. The CEC will continue its work to expand bidirectional, binational partnerships between BBRC-HCHD researchers, community collaborators, and stakeholders to gain insight into the expressed health-related needs of the region. These collaborations will facilitate biomedical and behavioral research that will expand the scope and breadth of the BBRC-HCHD. Targeted strategies will drive the proposed efforts and are delineated in three Specific Aims: 1) Create and foster meaningful partnerships to expand the breadth/scope of BBRC-HCHD collaborations to facilitate community engaged research addressing expressed health-related needs and priorities, 2) Leverage opportunities to engage, recruit, and retain participants in research studies within our predominantly Hispanic population of Mexican origin, and 3) Augment culturally and linguistically sensitive dissemination strategies of research results by partnering with community collaborators and stakeholders to reach our undeserved and rural communities. In order to accomplish the proposed work, the CEC will utilize community based participatory research strategies, and evaluation methods. Implementation of the proposed work will be multi- pronged, utilizing multi-media technology and face-to-face contact. A promotores de salud/Community Health Worker (CHW) model will be included as one of the proposed strategies to reach underserved community members in a culturally and linguistically sensitive manner, to facilitate community outreach and dissemination efforts at a ?grass roots? level.
