An innovative online resource designed to support health researchers who engage with local communities has re-launched with a new name and a new look.

CORUS (Community Research Utilities and Support), an online repository for tools and resources that support community engaged research, was launched by the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute’s Community Health Engagement Program under the name CTSA2Community in July 2011. The new site features a more informative, user-friendly interface and puts additional emphasis on encouraging material contributions related to community engaged research from the 60 centers across United States supported by Clinical and Translational Science Awards from the National Institutes of Health.

“We sought to create a ‘shell’ surrounding the original site that introduces community engaged research in a clear and engaging way,” said Helen Sanematsu, MFA, assistant professor of design communication at the Herron School of Design at IUPUI, who implemented the redesign in collaboration with Attic Design Collective, a small design firm in Indianapolis. “This gives CTSAs a user-friendly way to introduce researchers to community engaged work, and help them access tools and other materials so they can develop their own projects.”

The redesign process was guided by input from consults from other CTSA community engaged research programs, including the Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, University of California at Davis, University of Chicago, University of Colorado, University of Minnesota, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Washington University in St. Louis, Weill Cornell Medical College and the Community-Campus Partnership for Health, a non-profit organization that promotes health through partnerships between communities and higher educational institutions.

“We want this site to be a relevant and useful resource for our partners across the CTSA Consortium,” said Douglas Miller, M.D., director of the Indiana CTSI CHEP and Richard M. Fairbanks Professor of Aging Research and professor of medicine at the IU School of Medicine. “Together, we can make CORUS sing as the central point in an ongoing conversation about all the ways we’ve learned to connect our communities to the innovative work at our institutions.”

Without CORUS, the CTSA consultants noted that they often have to visit multiple sources to discover the same materials that are easily accessible and available on the site. To encourage the sharing activities that fuel the site, Attic Design Collective added features to the interface that display the growing number of holdings, and developed new material that provides more guidance on what constitutes a resource and how to submit a resource. The submission process has also been streamlined compared to the original launch of the site. Technical support for the redesign was provided by the Indiana CTSI Advanced Research Technology Core.

Materials hosted by CORUS include “toolkits” related to various community engagement projects, including checklists, overviews, form templates, evaluation methods, images related to various topics; recruitment materials such as posters, flyers, IRB information and other materials; grant program guidelines, training modules, workshop syllabi, job description samples and scholarly articles.

Emily Hardwick, MPH, program manager for the Indiana CTSI CHEP, notes she recently leveraged the materials on CORUS to successfully establish the Indiana CTSI’s community based research pilot grant program.

“We had never created a pilot program in our community engagement program,” she said. “When I was asked to develop materials for the pilot program, I turned to CORUS and read everything I could find on the topic. The materials were invaluable to building our own program.”

The recipients of the first annual Indiana CTSI CHEP pilot grants were selected earlier this summer to advance community engaged research on topics as diverse as raising awareness of HIV among adolescents to investigating the safety of in-hospital underwater births. The eight grant recipients, each having an academic and community partner, will receive a total of $120,000.

CORUS has been supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through multiple grants from the NIH National Center for Accelerating Translational Sciences, formerly the National Center for Research Resources, to the Indiana CTSI in 2009 and 2011.

To learn more about CORUS, explore available resources, or contribute new information, visit ctsacorus.org.

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CORUS is an online repository for tools and resources that support Community Engaged Research. For more information, visit ctsacorus.org.