Our Mission
The North Carolina Community Engagement Alliance (NC CEAL) is a community-engaged research initiative that seeks to strengthen communities across North Carolina by championing science-based resources, fostering partnerships, and promoting innovative, community-driven research to enhance health for all. We plan to achieve this mission with the following goals:
- Utilize a nutritional intervention to address the dietary intake of fruits and vegetables in a community in rural North Carolina
- Construct a course for community and organizational leadership to deepen their capacity to design and conduct research
- Learn about the nutrition/food insecurity that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) girls and young women are experiencing in North Carolina
- Build community capacity to use evidence-based practices and knowledge of current scientific advancements and health issues
The History of NC CEAL
2020-2022:
In Fall of 2020, The National Institutes of Health put out a call for institutions to leverage relationships with community to develop community response teams (CRTs) in direct action against the COVID-19 pandemic. These response teams were composed of 10-12 leaders from underrepresented communities in North Carolina. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill partnered with Community Campus Partnerships for Health to develop the North Carolina Community Engagement Alliance. Work continued to focus on the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.
This work consisted of multiple projects like creating a crowdsourcing contest to generate ideas about building trust between patients and providers, developing a coloring book with response team members to raise awareness about the pandemic, and train community health workers to be mental health outreach workers. This work generated a coalition of organizations across the state to provide information, resources, opportunities, and collaboration.
2023:
During the spring 2023 the focus of the project evolved as rates of COVID infections began to decrease. The next issue to address was Long-COVID. NC CEAL partnered with several clinics, organizations, and institutions to better understand Long COVID in North Carolina and how we could best address it.
We conducted a survey assessing people’s knowledge of and symptoms related to Long COVID, we developed Long COVID educational sessions for providers, we developed a Long COVID toolkit, we surveyed people to see what their trusted health communication sources, and we assessed the experiences of African American women during the pandemic through photographs.
2024-Present:
In the fall of 2024, we met with our coalition partners to discuss the future of NC CEAL as the pandemic priorities lessened. Our partners tasked us with focusing on food as a driver of health. This work will now provide us several years to impact the food and nutrition landscape in North Carolina.
Our Leadership Team
Angelique Jennings, MPH, CHES® Project Manager
The North Carolina Community Engagement Alliance is one of 21 community-engaged research teams funded by the National Institutes of Health to address health disparities and provide trustworthy, science-based information essential for all communities to thrive. Westat, Inc. is the coordinating center for the initiative.
NC CEAL is administratively housed in The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Health Equity Research in the School of Medicine. NC CEAL is jointly led by Principal Investigators, Anissa I. Vines, MS, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Health, and Al Richmond, MSW, Executive Director of Community-Campus Partnerships for Health. The project is managed by Angelique Jennings, MPH, CHES®
North Carolina Community Engagement Alliance 