Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) Coordinating Center

ComPASS Coordination Center planning meeting

The Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University served as the Coordination Center for the nationwide Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) research initiative in partnership with the University of New Mexico College of Population Health and the data and social-science organization Mathematica. The initiative received funding from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Common Fund starting in September 2023.

The ComPASS initiative comprised of 25 community-serving institutions from across the nation seeking to identify and address underlying structural factors that negatively impact health like access to education, healthy food, employment, transportation and health care.

ComPASS Coordination Center Principal Investigators included:

ComPASS: Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society

The ComPASS Coordination Center directed multiple components of the program through three interdependent cores:

  • The Administrative Core led by Carroll-Scott, Diez Roux, and Eberth along with Luis Arturo Valdez, PhD, assistant professor in Community Health and Prevention and the Drexel Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program,
  • The Data Core led by Lindsay Shea, DrPH, director of the Policy and Analytics Center at the A.J. Drexel Autism Institute and Amal Harati, PhD, a senior researcher at Mathematica, and
  • The Research Capacity Building Core led by Jessie Kemmick Pintor, PhD, assistant professor in the Health Management and Policy, along with assistant professor Shannon Sanchez-Youngman, PhD, and professor Nina Wallerstein, DrPH, of the University of New Mexico.

During the project, the ComPASS Coordination Center accomplished:

  • Hosting a virtual meeting in January 2024 and an in-person meeting in Bethesda, MD in September 2024 for >200 participants
  • Building a public facing and member-only ComPASS website to share resources, research findings, training materials, and upcoming events
  • Creating standard operating procedures, committee charters, and workplans to guide operations and monitoring
  • Providing one-on-one, small group, and Consortium-wide technical assistance and training workshops to assist community-based organizations with the design of their structural intervention plans
  • Gathering feedback on potential common data elements (CDEs) that would allow across-site analyses of ComPASS Program impacts
  • Delivering biweekly newsletters to Consortium members to keep teams abreast of upcoming events, deadlines, resources available, and important ComPASS news
  • Creating Quick Resource Guides and toolkits on topics such as IRB Basics, Common Data Elements, Systems Thinking, and Structural Intervention Planning

For more information, real the official NIH press release, read about the NIH Common Fund Award (1U24NR021014-01), or watch the ComPASS video.