DC Health Matters

Science Café 360 is a casual space for open dialogue between researchers, community members, and social scientists. Researchers demystify what they do, how they do it, and why they think it will help local residents. Community members - anyone from the casually interested to health activists, from citizen patients to street scholars - will probe, debate, and share ideas that come from living the experience. The cafes are hosted in DC’s Busboys and Poets (Brookland) coffee shop on weekday evenings.

We host about 4 cafes a year on topics that are of interest to our local community. Topics in the past have ranged from asthma to mental health to sickle cell disease. The needs and interests of the community were identified in a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) that is conducted every 3 years. Please see the 2016 CHNA on the homepage of the DC Health Matters portal: www.dchealthmatters.org/. The community identified the following four priority needs: mental health, place-based care, care coordination, and health literacy. All of our cafes will discuss topics within the context of one or more of these priority areas.

The format of the cafes is a collaborative panel discussion featuring researchers and community stakeholders who share a stage in discussing pressing health needs. We always leave time for questions from the audience and mingling after the café. We provide light refreshments and beverages at each café.

The cafes are hosted at Busboys and Poets – a local coffee shop – in the artistic and historical neighborhood of Brookland in Northeast DC: https://www.busboysandpoets.com/about/brookland (625 Monroe St NE, Washington, DC 20017). Busboys and Poets is a community gathering place. First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was created by owner Anas "Andy" Shallal, an Iraqi-American artist, activist and restaurateur. Busboys and Poets is now located in six distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington Metropolitan area and is a community resource for artists, activists, writers, thinkers and dreamers. There is street parking, a parking garage in the immediate vicinity, and the closest metro station is Brookland-Cua Metro (Red line).

The cafes are sponsored by the Clinical Translational Science Institute-Children’s National (CTSI-CN). The CTSI-CN is a partnership between Children’s National Hospital System and The George Washington University that was funded by an NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant, from the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The CTSI-CN offers unique resources in translating discovery to

improved health. The CTSI-CN works to ensure that advances in health are brought to communities in a quick, ethical manner. We believe that communities should have an important role in defining, designing and implementing research. The Science Cafes are intended to connect researchers and community stakeholders by fostering open dialogue and communication. You can learn more about the CTSI-CN at: https://www.ctsicn.org/.

The goal of the cafes is to foster trust and develop relationships between researchers and community stakeholders. We want to ensure that the critical role of community engagement in research is understood. It is only through trust and partnership that we will improve the health and well-being of children, families, and communities.