The Anga Center for Community Health and Well-being - Extreme weather (EW) is increasingly recognized as a major threat to mental health and well-being in the United States (U.S.) and globally. Exposure to extreme weather events (EWEs) such as hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and heatwaves have been linked to elevated rates of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress, substance use, interpersonal violence, and suicidality. This is particularly true for low-resourced urban, agricultural, and rural communities with limited infrastructure for EW preparedness and disaster recovery. As the frequency and severity of EW-related disasters grow, there is an urgent need to identify effective adaptation and resilience strategies that protect health and well-being. East Africa (EA) stands in a critical position as one of the key regions in Africa for U.S. trade and security, but also one of the regions most vulnerable to EW. Communities across EA—rural and peri-urban populations, agricultural communities, and pastoral groups—face severe EW-related stressors, and have developed innovative strategies to adapt and maintain well-being under constrained infrastructure conditions. These communities provide a unique opportunity to generate generalizable knowledge that can inform adaptation to EW and mental health interventions in high-risk populations, including low-resourced urban, agricultural, and rural communities in the U.S. The central theme of the Anga Center for Community Health and Well-being is to improve community well-being by exploring the impacts of extreme weather on health and identifying interventions to reduce negative outcomes through transdisciplinary research with populations most at-risk. The Anga Center will be led by a multinational, transdisciplinary team of researchers with expertise in social work, meteorology, extreme weather, environmental science, migration, public health, biostatistics, psychiatry, community development, intervention science, and community-engaged research. With a commitment to long-term collaboration and capacity-building, the Center will support infrastructure development, technical training, workforce development, knowledge sharing, and networking among researchers, communities, and stakeholders in the U.S. and EA. The Anga Center will pursue three aims: (1) foster research that advances understanding of the health impacts of extreme weather and identifies interventions that reduce adverse outcomes in high-EW-exposure communities; (2) facilitate bidirectional knowledge exchange focused on EW and health between EA and U.S. investigators; and (3) identify locally developed adaptation and resilience strategies that may be transferable to high-EW-exposure communities in the U.S. through networking and collaboratively developed interventions. Together, these efforts will create a sustainable scientific platform for advancing EW and health research, strengthening community resilience, developing the next generation of EW-health researchers, and generating evidence to inform responses to EW-related health challenges in EA and the U.S.
