Engagement in Healthy Communities for People With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

This project will develop a skilled community of stakeholders through collaboration with Special Olympics to create capacity building working groups. Groups will collaborate to develop stakeholder training modules focused on leadership, research fundamentals, and health. Collaboratively developed trainings will be piloted to support revising of the Toolkit for the engagement of people with IDD in research. A range of stakeholders will be essential members of the team to design and provide critical feedback on the effectiveness of the Toolkit, research priorities, and ecologically valid methodologies. Finally, research priorities will be refined, and the research engagement Toolkit will be nationally disseminated to Special Olympics and relevant community organizations. The toolkit will include necessary training for people with IDD, as well as paid and unpaid caregivers to be engaged partners in research.