A team at Emory University’s HERCULES Exposome Research Center effectively builds relationships between researchers and communities through their grant program. HERCULES, an NIEHS-funded environmental health sciences core center, aims to enhance the capacity of local communities to address their environmental health concerns.

The HERCULES Community Grant Program uses part of their NIEHS grant to fund small local grants for Atlanta communities as they address their own environmental health concerns. A paper describes the program’s implementation and evaluation of its first three years. The researchers hope that other scientists in academic centers who want to strengthen community engagement efforts will replicate and adapt the program.

“When HERCULES started in 2013 as a new center, we wanted to move beyond outreach approaches that involve community members as passive recipients of research findings,” explained Melanie Pearson, Ph.D., director of the Community Engagement Core at HERCULES. “Along with our Stakeholder Advisory Board, we considered several approaches, and ultimately decided on a community grant program. We liked the idea of providing funding directly to community organizations so that the projects would be community driven and led.”

Implementation of the Community Grant Program

HERCULES launched the Shaheed DuBois Community Grant Program in 2014. It ran for three cycles and awarded 13 one-year grants of $2,500 to 12 small community organizations with minimal permanent staff. These organizations identified environmental health concerns, implemented their own solutions, and established relationships with the community through activities like mobilizing residents for a cleanup day, training community members to disseminate information on smoke-free homes, and involving residents in community gardening activities.

The program’s creators took the small size of their target organizations into account when planning implementation. For example, in the third cycle of the program, a grant-writing workshop was offered before the application deadline, reflecting previous concerns that smaller organizations were at a disadvantage. Moreover, HERCULES personnel pre-reviewed submitted applications and provided feedback to applicants who could then revise and resubmit their application. HERCULES personnel also offered technical assistance to grant recipients in the form of skills-training and information sharing that covered topics such as progress tracking and reporting. Overall, grantees found the hands-on technical assistance helpful.

Community Grant Program Addresses Community Health Concerns and Increases Community Capacity

Grantees addressed a variety of community health concerns such as water pollution, access to healthy foods, indoor smoking, and waste disposal. Even across such varied issues, grantees increased community members’ knowledge, awareness, and involvement through trainings, workshops, and volunteer opportunities. For example, one grantee trained 20 community members to carry out a door-to-door campaign promoting smoke-free homes.

Grantees also increased their own organization’s capacities by participating in the grant program. For example, grantees were able to confirm or refine their approaches, such as one grantee who confirmed their organization’s priority of investing in soil health. Grantees also emphasized that they learned the importance of engaging stakeholders and working directly in the community. Furthermore, at the end of the award period, most grantees had specific goals for continuing their projects, and some had already obtained additional funding, which they attributed to their accomplishments with the community grants.

When asked about participation in the program, one grantee shared, “With the community grant, we’ve been able to demonstrate our capacity to deliver quality programming and to speak to the results. This has helped us obtain new funding.”

“One of the goals of our grant program was to create sustainable projects in the community,” said Pearson. “Of course, we hoped that the grants would allow organizations to address immediate community concerns, but we also wanted to build community capacity, and we do see that with many of the grantees’ projects. Some projects were institutionalized – one project ended up changing local policy, and another was maintained by community members after our funding ran out. We also saw new partnerships and larger volunteer bases as a result of these grants. Overall, the evaluation of the program demonstrated that the grants were a great way to build capacity in a way that was really relevant to the communities themselves.”

Community-academic partnerships were enhanced by the community grant program. The program gave community-based organizations an entry point to talk with Emory scientists, staff, and students, while simultaneously increasing scientists’ awareness of Atlanta communities’ environmental health concerns. Through the program, the community engagement team also identified potential partners for future collaboration with HERCULES scientists, and some projects, including ones on neighborhood flooding and on soil contamination, developed into collaborative research projects funded through the HERCULES Pilot Program. The partnership-building that the community grant program accomplished is in keeping with the goal of informing the larger HERCULES team about community issues to better respond to local needs.

Improved and Expanded Community Grant Program

Based on the first three grant cycles, HERCULES and its Stakeholder Advisory Board made some changes to the program’s structure, now called the Clarence “Shaheed” DuBois Exposome Roadshow and Community Grant Program. The new program provides grantees up to $6,500 over three years in four phases, to organize, plan, take, and sustain action around a community’s priority environmental health issue. This longer relationship between grantees and HERCULES allows for more tailored technical support and for community groups to better address social and environmental injustices.

“We have had three communities complete our new four-phase program and are excited to see community groups having an effect on local environmental public health concerns,” said Pearson. “For example, one group of neighbors decided to address industrial pollution in their community, and, with the program, were able to coalesce as a group and develop an action plan to promote community science. Their use of community science led to funding for air sampling and revisions to the city’s industrial zoning codes.”

In the future, Pearson and her team will continue to implement and evaluate this new program, by assessing the processes and outcomes via document review, qualitative interviews, and focus groups with the community members who participate. The information they learn will inform future iterations of the program and its dissemination to others who wish to enhance community capacity to address local environmental and public health concerns. You can read about the past and current grant programs on the HERCULES website.