Developing a Framework for Planning, Implementing and Evaluating Academic-Community Partnership Efforts to Address Environmental Health Community Change

There is increasing recognition of the importance of partnering with communities for science-based approaches to improve public health.  Community engagement is particularly important in issues of environmental health, where solutions frequently involve combinations of educational, behavioral, practice, and policy changes.  The National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences’ Core Centers include Community Outreach and Engagement Cores (COECs) to support academic-community partnerships that incorporate science-based approaches in community change efforts. Because COECs’ activities, roles, and partnerships vary by issue and over time, it can be difficult to evaluate their cumulative impact on community health.  In this presentation, we present a framework for planning, implementing and evaluating community change.

The COEC framework incorporates three conceptual areas of work: community change, community based participatory research and translational research. This framework provides a tool for COECs, and others engaged in academic-community partnerships, to understand their place in community change efforts and to understand where a community is in addressing an issue, in order to provide support to community partners wherever they happen to be in the community change cycle. The framework is circular in structure in order to communicate the cyclical nature of community change.  Our framework recognizes that communities are dynamic and reflects the need for academic-community partnerships to be responsive to these changes.

Finally, this presentation will offer a set of evaluation questions designed to enable those engaged in academic-community partnerships to evaluate their efforts, process and progress in affecting community change as well as the impacts of the change on the community.