University of Massachusetts Boston receives $7.4 million grant from National Institutes of Health
UMass Boston and Harvard School of Public Health partner to establish an exploratory community-based center for health and health care disparities
The University of Massachusetts Boston announced that it will establish an exploratory research center for health and health care disparities in collaboration with Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). The community-based project is funded by a $7.4 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. The center will be called the HORIZON Center to reflect its four core missions of providing healthy options, research, interventions, and community organizing.
Based on many years of experience in community engagement, community leadership, and coalition-building to reduce the impact of violence, racism and social and environmental factors on health, Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) has played a major role in the development of this center.
"UMass Boston is proud to partner with the Harvard School of Public Health in working with the Cherishing Our Hearts and Souls Coalition of Roxbury to address and resolve health disparities in our communities," said Chancellor J. Keith Motley. "We propose to increase the number of local agencies, community organizations and residents who contribute to and participate in research, training, health promotion, and community organizing activities."
“This award and our partnership with the HORIZON Center enable us to expand the opportunities for HSPH students and faculty to address racial and ethnic health disparities and to serve our local neighborhood of Roxbury where health risks remain so high,” said James H. Ware, dean for academic affairs at HSPH. “We hope that what we learn and put into practice in our own community can eventually benefit urban residents across the nation.”
Added Brian Gibbs, director of the Program to Eliminate Health Disparities at HSPH: "Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith and I are invigorated by this new partnership and have high expectations for it. The HORIZON Center will play a crucial role in engaging our researchers, community partners, along with Roxbury and other local neighborhood residents, in the discovery and implementation of promising community-based solutions to address an unequal burden of poor health and violence. At the core of the center's mission is a strong commitment to training, research, and practice approaches for both students and faculty and ensuring a mutually beneficial, measurable, and sustainable impact for our communities." Dr. Prothrow-Stith is Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of the Practice of Public Health at HSPH.
The HORIZON Center's four core missions, as well as its research and pilot projects, are all designed to strengthen the evidence-based practices and strategies for understanding and training practitioners in reducing health disparities.
The HORIZON Center will focus on community-based participatory research in Boston neighborhoods with high levels of health disparities. HSPH has been working in partnership with the Community Research Advisory Board and participants from the Cherishing our Hearts and Souls Coalition, both based in Roxbury. This Roxbury partnership will be a vital part of the new HORIZON Center. Roxbury has the youngest, poorest, least educated, and least employed population of all of the Boston neighborhoods. In the recently released Boston Public Health Commission's Disparities Report it was reported that across a lifespan Boston's racial and ethnic groups have strikingly disparate risks of illness and death. Black Bostonians as a group have the worst health compared to all other residents on a broad range of indicators, with higher rates of preterm birth, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, hospitalization, cancer mortality, and premature death from a variety of conditions.
“The Center will bring together a broad range of perspectives and expertise and focus them on the common goal of reducing the health disparities that place such an unequal burden on Roxbury and other Boston neighborhoods,” said Celia Moore, chairperson of the Psychology Department at UMass Boston. “Each partner in the Center will bring many strengths to the partnership to help in this endeavor. By working together, we will multiply our combined strengths and increase the potential for effective community-based research and research training.”
In addition to producing evidence-based models for eliminating health disparities in urban communities, the project, led by UMass Boston, sets the stage for tremendous institutional capacity building and even greater opportunities for reducing health disparities in minority communities in the United States. UMass Boston and its partners bring to this endeavor outstanding leaders and researchers from across disciplines who are committed to the design, implementation, examination, and distribution of culturally appropriate models to improve health outcomes for Roxbury residents that have implications for poor, urban and underserved communities across the nation.
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About the University of Massachusetts Boston
Established in 1964, the University of Massachusetts Boston prides itself on providing challenging teaching, distinguished research, and extensive public service to Boston and the Commonwealth. Through its six colleges and two graduate schools, the university offers undergraduate and graduate study to 13,000 students in more than 150 fields. For more information, please see www.umb.edu.
Media who would like to interview faculty at Harvard School of Public Health should contact:
Christina Roache - Phone: 617-432-6052
croache@hsph.harvard.edu