Community Outreach and Engagement

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The primary objective of The Tisch Cancer Institute’s (TCI) Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) Program is to mitigate health disparities across the cancer care continuum and lessen the cancer burden within our community, with a focus on racially and ethnically minoritized and historically marginalized groups. Our newly identified catchment area now encompasses all five boroughs of New York City, home to a diverse population where 85 percent of the Institute’s cancer patients reside. Significant socioeconomic challenges in New York City contribute to disproportionately worse cancer outcomes among these populations, with notable racial and ethnic disparities in cancer incidence and mortality. Community outreach is a priority at the Institute, with an extensive COE program bridging the community and research to inform clinical and research training and facilitate responsive programs.

Under the leadership of Cardinale B. Smith, MD, PhD, Associate Director, the COE has established a robust infrastructure for community engagement and has flourished by fostering collaborations and achieving milestones such as the development of a user-friendly community-facing data dashboard, robust infrastructure for bidirectional research, and enacting cancer policy initiatives. Evaluation efforts are rigorous, ensuring alignment with community needs in tandem with the three identified aims. The Specific Aims of the COE component are to:

Monitor and evaluate the cancer burden, related disparities, and needs within and beyond the TCI catchment area;
Engage catchment area communities in outreach, programming activities, and clinical trial enrollment;
Inform and facilitate programmatic research and policy initiatives responsive to identified cancer-related and community-driven priorities within and beyond the catchment area.

Community Advisory Board

Members of the Community Advisory Board (CAB) represent diverse professional, sociodemographic, and racial/ethnic backgrounds that span the foci of NYC. They represent community- and faith-based organizations and federally qualified health centers and include patient advocates representing each of our priority cancer types and all boroughs in NYC. Through a structured, iterative, responsive process viewed through a health equity lens, our CAB members help identify and mitigate upstream causes of cancer disparities that disproportionally impact individuals from historically minoritized and marginalized communities. Three workgroups, each with an emphasis on outreach, education, policy and research, define our focus: Risk Reduction, Early Detection, and Screening; Treatment, Survivorship, and Supportive Oncology; and Community Scientists.

We also work to ensure that our Advisory Board members reflect the communities that we serve, that we provide key cancer-related messages based on recent research, and that we pinpoint and reduce health care delivery disparities.

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