Our Approach
Creative Collaboration
The core of REACH will consist of five Collaborative Learning Tables (CLT), one for each of our five focus areas. At the onset, these tables will be comprised of six people, three from the community and three from Rutgers. The CLTs will serve as a bridge for academic and community-based experts to work collaboratively, share best practices, and learn from one another.
Together, these tables collaborate to create new approaches to address historical structural and systemic racism at the root of these issues.
Connecting Systems to Build Health Equity
Rutgers faculty will focus on learning from those working “on the ground” about obstacles to translating theory into practice. This space of dialogue and co-learning will lead to sustainable policy, systems, and environmental changes that mitigate historic and complex inequities that drive health disparities.
Our Focus Areas
Learn more about our five social determinants of health.
REACH's objectives grounded in principles of integrity, collaboration, innovation, and social justice:
- To work directly with communities to reduce health disparities by addressing adverse social determinants of health.
- To establish collaborative and inclusive community-academic partnerships in socially at-risk communities that develop evidence-based data, knowledge, and tools to support programs, policies, systems, and environmental change leading to health equity.
- To create opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations that will facilitate the translation of social science, clinical science, and public health research findings into sustainable, community-focused educational, programmatic, and population health initiatives.
- To translate community-based research to inform effective and equitable public policy at the state and local levels.
- To fundamentally change structures and systems at Rutgers to ensure that the transformation brought about by REACH is sustainable and inherent.