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List of COEPs
Introduction
For over a decade, the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences (NIEHS) has been at the forefront of promoting increased
interactions between environmental health scientists and communities.
In the early 1990s, NIEHS recognized the need to disseminate research
findings from its Core Centers in useful terms to increase knowledge
that can be applied to public health, and recommended the establishment
of a Community Outreach and Education Program (COEP) within each
of the Core Centers. COEP became a requirement of Core Centers in
1996, even though some Core Centers already possessed equivalent
outreach programs.
COEPs serve as a bridge between investigators at the Center and
the community. COEPs translate research findings emanating from
the Center into public health knowledge and convey the voice of
the community to researchers within the Core Center. In so doing,
COEP increases community awareness of environmental health and provides
researchers with the understanding of what environmental health
issues are of importance or concern to the community. The latter
point is crucial for populations that are more vulnerable to environmental
insults, for example, children, elderly, or socioeconomically disadvantaged
communities.
COEP is not a mechanism for conducting community-based research.
COEP serves as a valuable link between community members and Center
researchers. Such interactions may well lead to questions or hypotheses
that warrant further scientific investigation. The NIEHS is a leading
supporter of community-based
research , i.e., having active community involvement in the
processes that shape research and intervention strategies, as well
as in the conduct of research studies. However, within Core Centers
Program, such community-based research projects are pursued within
either the Pilot Project Program or a Research Core, not the COEP,
to insure proper scientific review and protection of human subjects.
Core Centers define the community with which they will interact.
Therefore, “community” may be defined in a multitude
of ways. Some Centers define their community geographically. For
example, the University of Iowa Environmental Health Sciences Center
COEP focuses their outreach efforts on rural populations living
in the Midwest U.S. The COEP addresses the impact of potentially
harmful environmental exposures (grain dust, concentrated animal
feeding operations, etc.) on the health of rural communities. In
contrast, the Environmental Health Sciences Center COEP at Columbia
University has selected specific neighborhoods within Northern Manhattan,
integrating the environmental health concerns of the public with
the knowledge and expertise of Center researchers. Some Core Centers
have chosen to define community in terms of occupations, such as
students, health care providers, or educators. The University of
Medicine and Dentistry at New Jersey (UMDNJ) maintains an innovative
education program that focuses on student and teacher education.
Harvard provides doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals
with the opportunity to learn more about, and integrate into their
work, environmental health sciences. Other Core Centers define community
in terms of vulnerable populations. Texas A&M University, for
example, works with promatoras in the U.S.-Mexico border region
to increase their understanding of environmental health issues and
to enhance their capacity to address health concerns within the
communities they work. The University of New Mexico addresses the
environmental health concerns of the Native American communities
in New Mexico and Colorado.
Outreach and education may be carried out in a variety of manners.
Primary among these are town hall meetings, community forums, K-12
science education curriculum development and health care professional
training. NIEHS encourages COEPs to collaborate with other COEPs,
when possible, and with existing outreach programs in their area
(Superfund, ATSDR, NCI, CDC, etc.). The summaries contained on these
web pages will provide the reader with a sense of the depth and
breadth of the work being performed by COEPs, individually and collaboratively,
across the country.
COEP Resource Center. In 2002, the NIEHS established a COEP
Resource Center to faciliate communication among COEPs by providing
them with a central repository of all their outreach and education
materials. The Resource Center is available to the general public
so they can learn more about COEP and gain access to many of the
materials developed by COEPs. The cornerstone of the Resource Center
is a searchable database (Electronic Information Resource Center)
of these outreach and education materials. If available, visitors
to this site can download curricula, reports, fact sheets, and more.
View the Individual COEP Summaries
COEP Resource Center
In 2001, NIEHS supported the development of a resource center to
support the efforts of the NIEHS-supported COEPs in making environmental
health research more accessible to the general public. The COEP
Resource Center has two primary objectives: (1) to facilitate communication
and information exchange among COEPs and (2) to increase public
awareness about NIEHS-supported outreach efforts.
The Resource Center serves as a central repository of all outreach
and education materials developed or used by COEPs. These materials
are kept in a physical library in Research Triangle Park, North
Carolina, and in an electronic database on the internet. To learn
more about the Resource Center and to view the variety of materials
located there, please visit the Resource Center website at http://www-apps.niehs.nih.gov/coeprc/
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