Community Outreach and Engagement

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 underserved populations. 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 differences in cancer incidence and mortality.

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 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 a range of professional and demographic 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, our CAB members help identify and mitigate upstream causes of cancer disparities in the underserved populations. 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 we serve, that we share key cancer-related messages based on recent research, and that we identify and address gaps in health care delivery.

Our Leadership

Community Outreach and Engagement Team

ASHLEY MORELAND
ASHLEY MORELAND

Program and Data Manager

TATIANA SABRINA RAMIREZ
TATIANA SABRINA RAMIREZ

Project and CHERC Research Coordinator

Alison Snow, PhD, MSW
Alison Snow, PhD, MSW

Director, Patient Navigation and Supportive Care

JINWEN HUANG
JINWEN HUANG

Health Educator, Y. S. F (預•善防)

Funding and Collaborative Initiatives

Cancer Health Research Center (2025-2030)

The Cancer Health Research Center at Mount Sinai (CHERC-MS) was established with grant funding from the American Cancer Society with the goal of reducing health inequities in cancer care and lessening the burden of cancer among underserved communities across the five boroughs of New York City.

Prevention and Screening Interventions Project (2024)

Funded by the American Cancer Society, our lung cancer program addressed lung cancer health disparities within Black communities by (1) delivering evidence-based lung cancer educational programs and lung screenings to at-risk community sites; (2) training Community Health Workers (CHWs) to work one-on-one with community members; and (3) determining the eligibility of individuals for low-dose tomography scan and navigating them through to screening.

P30 Administrative Supplement (2023-2024)

This award from the National Cancer Institute supported the creation of a program that recruited and trained college students to help local Black community members find free or low-cost breast cancer screenings.

Connecting for Lung Health (2022-2023)

Supported by CancerCare, Connecting for Lung Health provided culturally tailored lung cancer patient education and navigation into free or low-cost low-dose computed tomography screening for at-risk communities across New York City.

New York City Regional Cancer Collaborative

The New York City Regional Cancer Collaborative (NYCRCC) is a collaboration between academic and hospital cancer centers and supporting organizations in New York City to improve cancer burden within the city and beyond.

Members include:

  • Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia University
  • Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
  • Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center at Albert Einstein College of Medicine
  • Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health
  • Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
  • Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine
  • NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
  • Community-based organizations within NYC

Empowering Communities Through Outreach, Research and Support

Lung Cancer Awareness Event 2021
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