About

The Center for Healthy Communities

We are proud to be one of 37 CDC funded Prevention Research Centers.  Please visit the CDC, PRC At A Glance web page, or click here to view the PDF.  Funded since 2004, the main focus of the Center for Healthy Communities is to collaborate and partner with Native communities to explore various health disparities and potential ways to address these disparities. During our first cycle of funding, our core research projects were aimed at addressing the prevalence and impact of vision and hearing impairment and potential improvements to quality of life through correction (i.e. eye glasses and hearing aids) among some of the tribes in the Northwest and Mid-west United States.  During our second cycle of funding, we have shifted our focus to the prevention of noise-induced hearing loss and tinnitus in these same communities. 

Mission
To address the health promotion and chronic disease prevention needs of tribal and other underserved communities through community-based participatory research, and through training, dissemination, and evaluation activities.

Goals
• Sustain collaborative research partnerships
• Build research capacity for chronic disease prevention
• Conduct high-quality, community-driven prevention research

• Reduce the disease burden of the chronic diseases
• Maintain our Center as a regional resource
• Foster population health and prevention sciences within OHSU

Community-Driven Research

We stress, that in working with tribal and Hawaiian communities, no research will ever be allowed without strict community scrutiny and without appropriate community-level approvals. This has been the case for all of our tribal and Hawaiian research projects. For NW Indian people, ‘community’ usually means a specific tribe. Every tribe has its own council comprised of elected tribal members, and each council considers protocols and will usually recommend modifications to protocols. For future protocols submitted through the Center, the tribes (and other communities) will be expected to have an even greater role in protocol development than has sometimes been the case in our past projects. We will engage community members at the grass-roots level and seek their input into research, as well as consider the suggestions of tribal council members and tribal health planners. In a similar way, our Center will work with Native Hawaiian community members, as well as those officials who represent the Hawaiian communities in health-related matters. We are honored to be able to work with Native peoples and value their trust in all health research-related programs that we undertake as partners.