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Community Outreach and Engagement

Our Mission

Community Outreach and Engagement (COE) at Cedars‑Sinai Cancer (CSC) is dedicated to reducing the cancer burden in our catchment area by engaging communities and increasing cancer prevention, screening and clinical trial accruals, developing impactful research, and advancing policy initiatives.

Our Key Objectives

  • Cancer Health Equity: Assess and monitor cancer in Catchment Area populations. 
  • Evidence‑based interventions: Disseminate evidence-based cancer education, behavior and screening interventions.

 

  • Bidirectional engagement: Enable bidirectional research between our catchment area communities and Cedars‑Sinai Cancer
  • Systems change and policy: Influence clinical and public health care practice or policy

"There is a tremendous need to bring current, accurate information about cancer risks and prevention to underserved communities."

– Zul Surani

Evidence‑based Outreach and Education Programs

Health and Faith Initiative

Partnerships with faith‑based organizations and federally qualified health centers to implement cancer education, and cancer screening programs by engaging community health workers to reduce barriers to screening services among Korean, Latino, Filipino and Black communities.

Who We Are

Our 20‑member COE team, led by Zul Surani, associate director of Community Outreach and Engagement, is comprised of nine multilingual outreach coordinators who represent catchment communities that include Korean, Filipino, Latino, Black and LGBTQIA+. Many team members represent intersectional identities. The COE team works closely with bilingual and bicultural promotoras and community health workers who navigate underserved community members to screening and diagnostic services.

We collaborate regularly with our Community Advisory Board (CAB), which is comprised of carefully selected members. This bidirectional engagement facilitated by COE ensures integration of community into research and fostering ongoing collaboration between community members and Cedars‑Sinai Cancer leadership.

In Our Community

We have developed partnerships with 115 organizations that are inclusive of the racial and ethnic diversity of our catchment communities and reach racially and ethnically diverse catchment area communities which include those with cancer disparities such as LGBTQIA+, Korean, Filipino, Black and Latino communities, cancer patients and survivors. Our partners collaborate with our COE staff in communities where there is a higher incidence of late‑stage cancer diagnosis to expand evidence-based cancer control, catalyze research and facilitate clinical trial accruals.

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