Advancing Health Equity Through Innovative Community Capacity Building, Data Science & Delivering Community-Centered Structural Interventions & Outcomes: Drexel's ComPASS Coordinating Center (C3) - PROJECT SUMMARY The proposed Advancing Health Equity Through Innovative Community Capacity Building, Data Science & Delivering Community-Centered Structural Interventions & Outcomes: Drexel's ComPASS Coordination Center (C3) will provide oversight for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) Program, a first-of-its-kind national effort to advance community-led health equity structural intervention research. Acting as its backbone, the C3 will administer and coordinate multiple components of the ComPASS Program through its three interdependent cores (Administrative, Data, and Capacity-Building) including creation and facilitation of a national Health Equity Research Assembly (HERA), establishing Communities of Practice (CoPs) and related affinity groups to foster cross-intervention and multi-sector collaboration and co-learning, planning and delivery of a virtual kick-off and in-person annual meetings, developing content for the programmatic website, oversight of data collection, harmonization, reporting, and sharing processes, and delivery of expert-lead trainings, one-on-one and group consultations, and technical assistance for ComPASS grantees. Our diverse team of investigators and staff has a sustained history of working with community-based organizations (CBOs) to conduct health equity research and develop and evaluate structural interventions in partnership with communities experiencing health and social inequities, who have been traditionally underserved, neglected, and/or mistreated by the academic and research enterprise. Our collective work spans urban and rural settings, local, national and global contexts, and a variety of racial, ethnic, Indigenous, immigrant, border, faith, disability, and sexual and gender minority communities. The C3 will play a critical role in ensuring NIH’s investment maximizes its impact, providing community grantees the tools, resources, and network they need to conduct high-quality, impactful structural interventions in their communities, ensuring the successes and lessons learned from those interventions are promoted widely and scaled up (as appropriate), and rebuilding community trust after decades of neglect and harm. Moreover, our overarching goal is to help CBOs in the ComPASS Program (and beyond) to advance health equity in their communities and achieve the sustainability needed to ensure long-term benefits.
