The Community Engagement Consultative Service (CECS) will help CTSA sites to exchange best practices and collectively strengthen their capacity for Community Engagement.

What do we mean by Community Engagement?

Community engagement is much broader than just recruiting people for research – it’s about a true, bidirectional partnership between academic health centers and the populations they serve. It’s about actively linking research with improved population health outcomes.

Community is an incredibly broad term and can, for example, include:

• Community clinics
• Public health departments
• Schools
• Neighborhood associations
• Faith-based organizations
• Parks and Recreation Departments
• Local businesses and employers
• Police and fire departments
• Advocacy organizations
• Local artists
• Private physicians/group practices

What do we mean by "Best Practices"?

The CECS project, over the next year, will work to identify examples of people and institutions that do community engagement well. These examples might be rigorously tested and evidence-based or they might simply be practices or programs that are commonly recognized in the community as working well. Examples might be:

• Coalition building
• Including community members in IRBs
• Funding mechanisms for community partners
• Earning the community’s trust
• Teaching community-based participatory research methods to researchers
• Best approaches to working with Physician-Based Practice Networks
• Information Dissemination
• Proving training on community etiquette for faculty, researchers and students

How will it work?

Over the next year, Duke University Medical Center, working as the coordinating center, will collaborate with each CTSA site to do the following:

• Identify best practices in community engagement.
• Develop a directory of experts in community engagement.
• Assess each site’s skills and deficits in community engagement.
• Play matchmaker between sites that need help and those that would like to offer help.
• Facilitate the reimbursement process for each site to get one consultative visit before Sept. 2009.
• Evaluate the overall effectiveness of this best practices exchange.

Duke will be assisted by 5 regional site coordinators - UC Davis (West), University of Chicago (Mid-Western), University of Washington, St. Louis (Southern), University of Pennsylvania (Mid-Atlantic), and Columbia (North-Eastern).