# Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core

> **NIH NIH P30** · MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY · 2020 · $105,036

## Abstract

COMMUNITY OUTREACH EDUCATION AND ENGAGEMENT CORE: PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT 
The Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core (COE2C) enables two-way communication 
between the Core Center and community groups. The COE2C listens and responds to our communities who 
have concerns about environmental health. It communicates those concerns to our internal researchers, with 
the goal of informing their work and creating a platform for scientist-community dialog. One of our communities 
is composed of Native American Tribes in Maine who reached out to us to engage on issues of air and water 
pollution, as well as on issues involving how to explain, in a culturally sensitive way, the basis of environmental 
disease to their members. A second community is composed of the 22 towns in the Mystic River watershed in 
Massachusetts. These communities, some of which are environmental justice (EJ) communities, are 
concerned about water contamination from centuries of industrial activity. The two-way dialog with the CEHS, 
catalyzed by the COE2C, provides communities with important connections to scientific expertise to advise 
community members about their concerns. Additionally, the COE2C will continue to partner with health care 
professionals to optimize an innovative gene-environment toolkit to disseminate to this target audience. In the 
previous competitive cycle, the nurse community reached out to us to ask for such tools. Lastly, with funds 
independent of the NIEHS P30 program, the COE2C has created and will continue to develop other 
environmental health curricula in collaboration with research members; we plan to disseminate these materials 
locally and globally. The COE2C Director is Dr. Kathleen Vandiver who sits on the Internal Advisory Board of 
the CEHS. She will be responsible for convening the Community Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB) meetings 
and maintaining multi-directional interactions with the communities, partner organizations, and with all research 
members in the CEHS.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9913525
- **Project number:** 5P30ES002109-40
- **Recipient organization:** MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
- **Principal Investigator:** Kathleen Mead Vandiver
- **Activity code:** P30 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $105,036
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** — → 2023-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9913525

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9913525, Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core (5P30ES002109-40). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-14 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9913525. Licensed CC0.

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