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Meet the Research Leaders: Isaias Hernandez & Luisa Blanco, PhD, MBA

October 19, 2020 by Haley Cureton

Isaias: I believe LA County is facing a crisis when it comes to the financial wellbeing of its residents. I would like to present the data to the Board of Supervisors in hopes that it will encourage them to invest in the necessary resources and tools that will help lift many low-income individuals out of poverty and into financial security. Financial health should be seen as a component to public health.

Luisa: I want to do research that has a meaning, that leads to policy change. I want to be part of the LA community. It’s very important, if we want to change things, that we do community-based research.

Meet the Research Leaders: Bruce Reilly, JD

September 11, 2020 by Haley Cureton

I’m Bruce Reilly. I’m the Deputy Director of Voice of the Experienced. I’m also at another organization called Voters Organized to Educate (VOTE). I come to the work that I do from growing up in foster homes, being homeless, going to prison for 12 years, getting out on parole, and then I moved to New Orleans to go to the one law school that admitted me.

I was a former jailhouse lawyer, which is when you’re on the inside and everyone comes to you and says, “Hey, here is my case,” or, “I gotta write a letter to the judge.” All the different issues that people tangle with, they would come to the guy who can write the petition for you, do the research. I was a lawyer before I was a lawyer.

Meet the Research Leaders: Jane Chung-Do, DrPH, MPH

August 28, 2020 by Haley Cureton

The MALAMA Aquaponics Project actually started back in 2009. One of our team members, Auntie Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, is a community leader in Waimānalo and has been doing community aquaponics education for over 10 years now. She saw the need and the interest for the community to grow their own food. Colonization impacted Native rights that people have lost in Hawaii, which fragmented and disconnected Native Hawaiians from their own traditional food systems, and being able to grow their own food and having access to land. She saw this disconnect and how it contributed to high rates of obesity and cardiovascular diseases among Native Hawaiians. I got connected with Auntie Ilima through my graduate research assistantship. I just kind of followed her around, and I was one of her fans.

Meet the Research Leaders: Carlton Turner

August 21, 2020 by Haley Cureton

I am the community partner in a project focusing on reimagining, both the health infrastructure and food infrastructure, in our small community of Utica, Mississippi. So far it has looked like the community building skills in collecting data in the form of story, learning how to do oral histories, learning how to do interviews, and really understanding how those pieces can aid us in reconstructing a rural community that basically has been decimated by disinvestment and deterioration over the last three decades.

We cannot build a culture of health without first building a culture of empathy

August 17, 2020 by irlwebsite

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has become synonymous with the phrase “building a culture of health”. Many of us working in public health are diligently pursuing the promises embedded within this phrase, such as equity, justice and well-being for all people. And yet, we cannot build a culture of health unless we first have a culture of empathy.

Research Leadership in Action: A Life Story and Lessons Learned by Dr. Veronica Womack

July 5, 2020 by Haley Cureton

While growing up in rural Alabama, I had the great fortune of encountering life experiences that made me intellectually curious about the life circumstances and relationships that I observed. During this time, fundamental questions about rural people and places were formed and I have spent both my personal and professional life trying to answer them. My early career was focused on documenting and highlighting the lives of rural people, particularly those in the Black Belt region of the South. Not only was this region’s culture my own cultural heritage, it was also critical in the development of our country’s socioeconomic and political systems. So, while often overlooked, what happens in the Black Belt region matters, historically and today.