Center for Health Equity

Project Details: The Community and Stakeholder Engagement Studio (CSES) offers researchers a consultative service, assisting in effective study design, intervention planning, impactful implementation, evaluation, and sustainability to support health equity for community organizations and their research partners. Community engagement, trust, and collaboration play a key role in the Center for Health Equity's vision of a world populated by healthy people across flourishing communities developed through research. 

Actively engaging community members in research plays a critical role in advancing equity for several reasons: 

• Expanding stakeholder networks 

• Achieving governance of shared power among stakeholders from health disparate communities and investigators 

• Improving the rigor of research through higher participation rates 

• Elevating insightful interpretation of findings 

• Developing and implementing culturally relevant interventions 

• Ensuring valid and reliable assessment 

• Identifying new engagement strategies

Our Community and Stakeholder Engagement Studio (CSES) at the Center for Health Equity offers researchers a consultative service to achieve these goals. CSES allows for effective study design, intervention planning, impactful implementation, evaluation, and sustainability to support health equity for community organizations and their research partners. 

A researcher interested in conducting community-engaged research may contact the center with a request to design, implement, and evaluate the community engagement component of their research. Using the principles outlined above, the CSES team then assists in planning and designing an impactful approach to engage community members and key stakeholders around the researcher’s specified need or question. To learn how to engage with the CSES for your research, please contact Senior Project Manager Anne Marie Thompson via email: [email protected]

We have two current studios: 

Community and Stakeholder Engagement Studio(CSES) for gun violence prevention:

An example of the CSES in action is the recent NIH-funded Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program (HVIP) in Houston, Texas. The Houston HVIP at Memorial Hermann Hospital – Texas Medical Center aims to break the cycle of violence through intervention, care, follow-up care, and attention to social determinants of health. More details about the project can be found here.  Principal investigators from the HVIP, Alexander Testa, PhD, and Sandra McKay, MD, utilize the Center for Health Equity’s CSES to solicit community engagement around program design and implementation. 

(HVIP Group)

Community and Stakeholder Engagement Studio for Food Is Medicine:

We also launched a Community Advisory Group (CAG) of mothers who have participated in produce prescription programs to inform the development, implementation and evaluation of Food Is Medicine interventions. CAG members provide feedback on effective food prescription programs and discuss supports and barriers to eating healthy, including SNAP and WIC participation. This CAG was launched in March 2024 and will meet regularly to inform the development of produce prescription type of interventions. Read more here.

(MOM CAG Group)

Project Contact: Anne Marie Thompson, MPH

Project Team

Anne Marie Thompson, MPH

Senior Program Manager
Center for Health Equity

[email protected]

Shreela Sharma, PhD, RDN, LD

Director, Center for Health Equity

Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Epidemiology

[email protected]

Heidi Hagen McPherson, MPH

Co-Lead, Health Equity Collective

[email protected]

Project Manager

Naomi Tice, MPH

Center for Health Equity

[email protected]