On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

Social Media Research Dissemination is the applied science of connecting the research and academic communities with teachers, parents, patients, students, policymakers, consumers…. REAL PEOPLE: those individuals, families and communities impacted by scientific progress and discovery. Put simply, social media research dissemination represents a potential threat to power structures that contribute to and maintain inequity, undermine diversity and resist inclusion. This is GREAT news for researchers and community advocates looking to effect change and build a Culture of Health.

Announcing the 2019 IRL Teams!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2019-2022) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. Meet the 2019 IRL teams...

We barreled across the high desert, five people to a car, training and debriefing as we drove, scouring data and reading other state plans in hotel rooms late at night, and stopping wherever we could for more coffee and chocolate. We did this because we care, and we believe that better policy is informed by local knowledge and that we train the next generation of interdisciplinary participatory researchers through mentoring and modeling. The students did it for the thrill of being engaged in something that matters.

As I reflect on our work using structured dialogue in Guilford County, NC, I become a witness to something happening in Next Generation Academy (NGA). Black parents begin to release some of the emotional burdens they retain from a long history of navigating the U.S. public education system.

Three years ago, the first cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) fellows embarked on a transformative personal and professional journey, stretching beyond their daily work and building leadership skills to drive social change. This year, as they become the program’s first graduates and alumni, we are celebrating all they have learned and the impact they have had in their communities.

This special issue—Unlocking Opportunities to Create a Culture of Health in Housing: Lessons from Interdisciplinary, Community-Engaged Research Teams—explores connections between housing and health, highlighting the research of sev

Are you ready for the big dance?
Getting to the big dance requires an effective team that attends to team-building and process. Building a winning basketball team takes the right coaching, players who learn to work well with each other, the fortitude to get through the season even with injuries, and maybe a little luck! Similarly, building a winning IRL team takes mentoring, some persistence, and teammates with different but complementary expertise, and knowledge of systems that lead to building a culture of health.

People often ask me what unique drive, mindset, or values motivate someone to pursue a leadership role. As I’ve had the pleasure of working with and coaching leaders throughout my career, one key trait stands out above the rest for me: Leaders care deeply about people and the world, and they see a gap between where we are and where we could be.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

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.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

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.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

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. 

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

Social Media Research Dissemination is the applied science of connecting the research and academic communities with teachers, parents, patients, students, policymakers, consumers…. REAL PEOPLE: those individuals, families and communities impacted by scientific progress and discovery. Put simply, social media research dissemination represents a potential threat to power structures that contribute to and maintain inequity, undermine diversity and resist inclusion. This is GREAT news for researchers and community advocates looking to effect change and build a Culture of Health.

We barreled across the high desert, five people to a car, training and debriefing as we drove, scouring data and reading other state plans in hotel rooms late at night, and stopping wherever we could for more coffee and chocolate. We did this because we care, and we believe that better policy is informed by local knowledge and that we train the next generation of interdisciplinary participatory researchers through mentoring and modeling. The students did it for the thrill of being engaged in something that matters.

As I reflect on our work using structured dialogue in Guilford County, NC, I become a witness to something happening in Next Generation Academy (NGA). Black parents begin to release some of the emotional burdens they retain from a long history of navigating the U.S. public education system.

Three years ago, the first cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) fellows embarked on a transformative personal and professional journey, stretching beyond their daily work and building leadership skills to drive social change. This year, as they become the program’s first graduates and alumni, we are celebrating all they have learned and the impact they have had in their communities.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

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. 

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

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.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

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.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

Social Media Research Dissemination is the applied science of connecting the research and academic communities with teachers, parents, patients, students, policymakers, consumers…. REAL PEOPLE: those individuals, families and communities impacted by scientific progress and discovery. Put simply, social media research dissemination represents a potential threat to power structures that contribute to and maintain inequity, undermine diversity and resist inclusion. This is GREAT news for researchers and community advocates looking to effect change and build a Culture of Health.

We barreled across the high desert, five people to a car, training and debriefing as we drove, scouring data and reading other state plans in hotel rooms late at night, and stopping wherever we could for more coffee and chocolate. We did this because we care, and we believe that better policy is informed by local knowledge and that we train the next generation of interdisciplinary participatory researchers through mentoring and modeling. The students did it for the thrill of being engaged in something that matters.

As I reflect on our work using structured dialogue in Guilford County, NC, I become a witness to something happening in Next Generation Academy (NGA). Black parents begin to release some of the emotional burdens they retain from a long history of navigating the U.S. public education system.

Three years ago, the first cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) fellows embarked on a transformative personal and professional journey, stretching beyond their daily work and building leadership skills to drive social change. This year, as they become the program’s first graduates and alumni, we are celebrating all they have learned and the impact they have had in their communities.

This special issue—Unlocking Opportunities to Create a Culture of Health in Housing: Lessons from Interdisciplinary, Community-Engaged Research Teams—explores connections between housing and health, highlighting the research of sev

Are you ready for the big dance?
Getting to the big dance requires an effective team that attends to team-building and process. Building a winning basketball team takes the right coaching, players who learn to work well with each other, the fortitude to get through the season even with injuries, and maybe a little luck! Similarly, building a winning IRL team takes mentoring, some persistence, and teammates with different but complementary expertise, and knowledge of systems that lead to building a culture of health.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

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.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Three years ago, the first cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) fellows embarked on a transformative personal and professional journey, stretching beyond their daily work and building leadership skills to drive social change. This year, as they become the program’s first graduates and alumni, we are celebrating all they have learned and the impact they have had in their communities.

We barreled across the high desert, five people to a car, training and debriefing as we drove, scouring data and reading other state plans in hotel rooms late at night, and stopping wherever we could for more coffee and chocolate. We did this because we care, and we believe that better policy is informed by local knowledge and that we train the next generation of interdisciplinary participatory researchers through mentoring and modeling. The students did it for the thrill of being engaged in something that matters.

As I reflect on our work using structured dialogue in Guilford County, NC, I become a witness to something happening in Next Generation Academy (NGA). Black parents begin to release some of the emotional burdens they retain from a long history of navigating the U.S. public education system.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

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. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

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.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

Social Media Research Dissemination is the applied science of connecting the research and academic communities with teachers, parents, patients, students, policymakers, consumers…. REAL PEOPLE: those individuals, families and communities impacted by scientific progress and discovery. Put simply, social media research dissemination represents a potential threat to power structures that contribute to and maintain inequity, undermine diversity and resist inclusion. This is GREAT news for researchers and community advocates looking to effect change and build a Culture of Health.

We barreled across the high desert, five people to a car, training and debriefing as we drove, scouring data and reading other state plans in hotel rooms late at night, and stopping wherever we could for more coffee and chocolate. We did this because we care, and we believe that better policy is informed by local knowledge and that we train the next generation of interdisciplinary participatory researchers through mentoring and modeling. The students did it for the thrill of being engaged in something that matters.

As I reflect on our work using structured dialogue in Guilford County, NC, I become a witness to something happening in Next Generation Academy (NGA). Black parents begin to release some of the emotional burdens they retain from a long history of navigating the U.S. public education system.

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

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.

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.

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.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

Three years ago, the first cohort of Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) fellows embarked on a transformative personal and professional journey, stretching beyond their daily work and building leadership skills to drive social change. This year, as they become the program’s first graduates and alumni, we are celebrating all they have learned and the impact they have had in their communities.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

This special issue—Unlocking Opportunities to Create a Culture of Health in Housing: Lessons from Interdisciplinary, Community-Engaged Research Teams—explores connections between housing and health, highlighting the research of sev

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

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. 

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.

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.

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

We barreled across the high desert, five people to a car, training and debriefing as we drove, scouring data and reading other state plans in hotel rooms late at night, and stopping wherever we could for more coffee and chocolate. We did this because we care, and we believe that better policy is informed by local knowledge and that we train the next generation of interdisciplinary participatory researchers through mentoring and modeling. The students did it for the thrill of being engaged in something that matters.

As I reflect on our work using structured dialogue in Guilford County, NC, I become a witness to something happening in Next Generation Academy (NGA). Black parents begin to release some of the emotional burdens they retain from a long history of navigating the U.S. public education system.

This special issue—Unlocking Opportunities to Create a Culture of Health in Housing: Lessons from Interdisciplinary, Community-Engaged Research Teams—explores connections between housing and health, highlighting the research of sev

Are you ready for the big dance?
Getting to the big dance requires an effective team that attends to team-building and process. Building a winning basketball team takes the right coaching, players who learn to work well with each other, the fortitude to get through the season even with injuries, and maybe a little luck! Similarly, building a winning IRL team takes mentoring, some persistence, and teammates with different but complementary expertise, and knowledge of systems that lead to building a culture of health.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

To pave the way for further interdisciplinary research for health we, Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin (IRL Cohort 1), have developed a book series with the University of Cincinnati Press. Each volume in the edited series describes silo-breaking research that partners with community stakeholders to do work that will lead to community benefit.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

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. 

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.

People often ask me what unique drive, mindset, or values motivate someone to pursue a leadership role. As I’ve had the pleasure of working with and coaching leaders throughout my career, one key trait stands out above the rest for me: Leaders care deeply about people and the world, and they see a gap between where we are and where we could be.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

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. 

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

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.

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.

Are you ready for the big dance?
Getting to the big dance requires an effective team that attends to team-building and process. Building a winning basketball team takes the right coaching, players who learn to work well with each other, the fortitude to get through the season even with injuries, and maybe a little luck! Similarly, building a winning IRL team takes mentoring, some persistence, and teammates with different but complementary expertise, and knowledge of systems that lead to building a culture of health.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

We are interested in examining the engagement levels in mental health services in community-based versus home-based care and between rural versus urban settings. There has been an initiative in recent years with a focus on community-based mental health. “Community-based” refers to bringing services to homes and schools, which increases the level of engagement. Engagement can be defined in many different ways. We are looking at a number of appointments at the outset of services in a one month or 90 day period. Other folks might see engagement as no-show rates, things of that nature. 

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

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. 

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

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.

Prisons and jails are unhealthy environments under normal circumstances. A pandemic makes them even moreso.  With people living in tight quarters and limited access to soap, masks, hand sanitizer and other basic supplies, it is no surprise that we have seen the coronavirus ravage many prisons nationwide. Our team realized that people leaving these spaces needed clear information on how to transition back home during this pandemic. 

Social Media Research Dissemination is the applied science of connecting the research and academic communities with teachers, parents, patients, students, policymakers, consumers…. REAL PEOPLE: those individuals, families and communities impacted by scientific progress and discovery. Put simply, social media research dissemination represents a potential threat to power structures that contribute to and maintain inequity, undermine diversity and resist inclusion. This is GREAT news for researchers and community advocates looking to effect change and build a Culture of Health.

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks - and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location. 

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

I am from Team Philly in Cohort 4. I work with Ashlee Murray, MD, MPH and Melissa Dichter, PhD, MSW who are both researchers. I’m the community partner. We are looking at how we can improve the connection between pediatric medical providers and families who identify as experiencing domestic violence. We’re trying to develop a feedback tool where survivors would be able to have their voices heard in the screening and referral process, where they can say, “I was referred by my doctor, but I didn’t appreciate how they spoke to me about it,” or, “It was very impactful how the nurse spoke to me, and she was so kind, and that worked well.” The provider will be able to take that information. Hopefully it will improve their screening practices. 

Welcome Cohort Five Research Leaders!

These 15 teams of researchers and community leaders will spend the next three years (2020-2023) working together to explore critical issues in their home communities and apply findings in real time to create healthier and more equitable policies and places to live. 

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.

At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

The name of our project is Improving Health Among Youth in Rural Appalachia: Enhancing School-Based Health Centers. I am the community leader. The two researchers, one is at Penn State University, and the other is at Child Trends.

What we’re studying is the school-based health center model. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of school-based health centers before, but they are nation-wide. Here in West Virginia, they started in the mid-90s. Our state has more school-based health centers per capita than any state in the country, and we have some of the oldest in the country. They’re a great health delivery model to ensure kids have access to comprehensive health care. 

We’ve never had anyone study the efficacy of them, the challenges they face, and the opportunities to expand the model and address some of the incredible health inequities that our kids face here in West Virginia, whether that be due to poverty, the rural landscape, or to the ongoing drug crisis. 

My interest is to try and promote the model to address some of these inequities. For our IRL project, we’ve done a number of interviews with providers around the state who work in these school-based health centers to hear what works, what doesn’t work, opportunities to do better, and the potential policy reform efforts that I could undertake to help them reach out to the kids who are in need of services.

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.

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.

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.

Social Media Research Dissemination is the applied science of connecting the research and academic communities with teachers, parents, patients, students, policymakers, consumers…. REAL PEOPLE: those individuals, families and communities impacted by scientific progress and discovery. Put simply, social media research dissemination represents a potential threat to power structures that contribute to and maintain inequity, undermine diversity and resist inclusion. This is GREAT news for researchers and community advocates looking to effect change and build a Culture of Health.

Our team partnered with the I AM ABLE Center for Family Development on the West Side of Chicago. They are a wellness and mental health center. They created a model – TR4IM (Trauma Response and Intervention Movement). We’re working with them to do a program evaluation of that particular model and building capacity so they can do evaluation of the work moving forward. That might help them seek additional funding. 

Somewhat separately, we’re doing qualitative work with people who have been part of the program, to get their feedback and see if there are barriers to success or things that people who are engaged in the program think would be a good idea to consider shifting.

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.

The convening was a wake-up call about the value of community-engaged research. As a local sector, we had not built the base of evidence in terms of what had worked, was working or not, and what change was happening...and for whom. An influential outsider defined what impact local efforts would be measured by instead of the neighborhood residents who had worked so hard to rebuild their communities. We needed stronger research partners and evaluation capacities--and a more comprehensive approach to community building and understanding of impact.

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. 

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.

It may feel impossible to think about self-care amidst a world on fire. To care for ourselves is an incredible privilege, and the systemic forces of oppression and injustice often allow some more access to this privilege than others. And, our ability to continue to show up to the work of health equity and justice is inextricably linked to our own wellbeing.

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.

We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions. 

We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”

We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it. 

In 2017, researchers, advocates, and community members formed the Strengthening Colors of Pride team and set out to understand the lived experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other gender and sexual minority (LGBTQ+) people in the San Antonio Metro Area. Project leaders, with the help of a research team and community advisory board members, developed the largest survey of LGBTQ+ identified individuals ever conducted in South Texas. The survey provides important insight about the demographics of LGBTQ+ people in the area and their experiences with housing and homelessness, healthcare, employment, familial rejection and support, financial stability, resiliency, and much more.

The one thing that was clear is that the LGBTQ+ community is extremely resilient and community members often have strong social networks.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.

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.

If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.

But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.

Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.