Community Outreach and Education Core (COEC): Methods to improve environmental public health literacy in minority communities

The Community Outreach and Education Core (COEC) is part of the NIEHS-funded University of Michigan School of Public Health (UM SPH) Environmental Health Science (EHS) Core Center. The COEC fosters enhanced understanding among community members, policymakers and public health decision-makers concerning the role of environmental exposures in disease. The UM SPH EHS Core Center specifically focuses on how environmental exposures over the lifecourse are linked to asthma, early life development, diabetes, and cancer through three pathways (epigenetic regulation, oxidative stress, and endocrine disruptors). Detroit and Southeast Michigan, in particular, are disproportionately impacted by environmental exposures (e.g. air pollution) and have reduced access to resources that might protect against the negative effects of those exposures (e.g., access to foods rich in antioxidants), increasing vulnerability to negative effects of those exposures. Over the lifecourse, these increased environmental exposures and increased vulnerabilities contribute to racial, ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities. We will describe the COEC Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB), made up of Detroit residents, representatives from community-based organizations, and public health decision makers, whose role is to guide the work of the COEC. We will describe the role of the SAB in informing the development of materials to enhance bi-directional communication between the UM SPH EHS and community member and policy and decision makers, in order to promote informed decision public health decision making. We will describe preliminary findings from evaluation of these efforts, based on focus groups with community members and on a process-evaluation conducted with Center and SAB members.