Program Snapshot

The goals of the NIH Common Fund Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) program are to 1) Study the fundamental causes of poor health and chronic diseases in American communities, and 2) Develop a new research model for NIH where research projects are led by community organizations in collaboration with research partners.

In the United States, complications and diseases that arise from untreated or poorly managed health issues often cost significantly more to treat than addressing causes of disease at its source. ComPASS provides a different approach to addressing health in our communities. Rather than treat the symptoms, this program seeks to better understand these barriers to health in communities and supports the research to address those challenges through innovative structural interventions. Structural interventions are efforts to change the conditions where people are born, grow, live, work, age, and play that may shape or constrain health behaviors and health outcomes. 

The ComPASS program provides an unprecedented opportunity for communities to lead the design of innovative structural intervention research projects to identify and study barriers to health and explore ways to overcome those barriers that make sense for their local community. The program enables communities and researchers to work collaboratively as equal partners in all phases of the research process, exploring ways to improve health outcomes and create lasting change in communities across the nation.

Promoting health across the lifespan in communities across the country cuts across the missions of Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs) throughout the NIH. This Common Fund program will focus on health services research in a way no NIH ICO could achieve individually. Rather than tackling poor health one disease, organ system, or life stage at a time, ComPASS projects address structural factors that impact multiple dimensions of health.

ComPASS also seeks to cultivate community trust and partnerships, build research capacity among community members and relevant partners to do rigorous and scientifically valid research independently, and enhance community organization competitiveness for future funding. The program aims to serve as a launch pad for future community-led efforts to study ways to improve health. 

The Common Fund is supporting three initiatives to achieve the goals of the ComPASS program:

• The Community-Led Research Projects develop, implement, and evaluate structural interventions, in partnership with research organizations (e.g. universities, research institutes, etc.), to understand and address underlying factors within communities that affect health. Each project site will also work with community organizations to form local Health Research Assemblies that will help shape the structural intervention. These research projects have three phases:
  • Phase I - Intervention Planning, Development, and Partnership: Plan, build partnerships, develop, and pilot community-led research strategies.
  • Phase II - Intervention Implementation: Implement community-led research strategies, collect and analyze data linking community changes to health effects.
  • Phase III - Intervention Assessment, Dissemination and Sustainability: Assess health outcomes, share study results and promising approaches, and implement sustainability activity plans.  
• The ComPASS Coordination Center (CCC) directs program administration and data coordination across ComPASS research projects. It will also amplify the community organizations' research and training efforts and establish the National Health Research Assembly, consisting of federal and non-federal partners in fields such as transportation, housing, urban planning, and public health to provide vital consultation on the development, implementation, and sustainability of the community-led research projects.
• The Research Hubs (Hubs) provide localized technical assistance and scientific support for the community-led research projects, as well as partnership support, research capacity building, and training designed in collaboration with the ComPASS Coordination Center. 

Through these initiatives, ComPASS program goals will be achieved by: 

• Supporting community organizations and their research partners in co-creating research to evaluate the community-led research projects.
• Creating partnerships that span multiple sectors of society, both locally and nationally, that advise, guide, and sustain the research.
• Building capacity in structural intervention research, enhancing the ability of community organizations and their research partners to implement and sustain useful findings from their research.
• Developing methods for capturing community changes and health effects and collecting and analyzing data to evaluate outcomes from the research projects.
• Sharing promising approaches resulting from the community-led research projects.

If you have questions about the Common Fund ComPASS Program, please email [email protected].