Development and implementation of a longitudinal quality assessment for community outreach programs.

235 Background: Part of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s mission is to educate the community and raise awareness about the importance of cancer prevention, outreach, screening, early detection, clinical trials and survivorship. Development of a logic model and evaluation plan enables us to assess program quality and identify areas for improvement and future outreach. Methods: A forward logic, iterative approach was used to develop logic models for our community outreach programs. Models were reviewed by key stakeholders including program staff and management. These were used as the basis for a comprehensive logic model encompassing the common elements across all programs. Results: Seven logic models were developed to capture work in tobacco, sun safety, breast health, obesity prevention, community education programs, as well as comprehensive community benefits program model. We designed a developmental evaluation to allow for an assessment that could be adapted in a dynamic, ever-changing environment. This approach is also responsive to program growth and changes. It measures demographic information about our community participants, satisfaction with our programs, and strength of our community partnerships and compares these to internal benchmarks and state information. We can re-contact participants for on-going assessments and provide cross-sectional and longitudinal reports. RedCap freeware was used to create online versions of all tracking measures. Since (date) we have captured information from 119 community participants, most of whom are Black and Latino/a, and are representative of traditionally underserved minorities. Conclusions: Logic models and evaluation plans are integral components of community outreach programming. They ensure that effective, high-quality community outreach programming is being delivered, allow for the assessment of impact and assessment against program benchmarks. More importantly, they provide continuous information about areas for program growth and improvement.

Genetics of Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes in African Americans

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are highly prevalent and lead to significant morbidity and mortality. In the United States, the impact of these conditions may be worse on historically underserved minorities, particularly African Americans. Genetic ancestry and differences in physiology are unlikely to be the sole or primary determinants of these disparities. In addition, research in this area has the ethically problematic possibility of conflating race with biology. Despite these important considerations and the challenges of conducting this work, population-based approaches for investigating the etiology of obesity and T2D may yield useful information about the pathophysiology of disease, and have implications that extend to all affected individuals. The purpose of this paper is to describe what is understood about the genetic variation that underlies obesity and T2D in African Americans and other individuals of more recent African descent and to highlight several examples that illustrate how ensuring adequate minority representation in genetic research improves its quality. For a variety of reasons a number of unique insights have been possible as a result of these efforts.