Each episode is a dynamic blend of interviews, storytelling, and practical takeaways, showcasing the power of multidisciplinary collaboration to address systemic racism and improve health outcomes. From the methodology behind successful team projects to the nuanced process of engaging communities, we illuminate how shared leadership, restorative practices, and intentional planning can create sustainable, impactful change. Whether you’re seeking inspiration, tools, or evidence to amplify your own efforts, this podcast offers a space to learn, reflect, and act.

What to Expect in Each Episode?

• Engaging conversations with health equity leaders and community partners
• Insightful stories that connect personal experiences with broader data and research
• Practical tools and resources to implement promising practices
• Honest reflections on challenges, lessons learned, and the transformative power of shared leadership

A Conversation with Team St. Louis (Cohort 7)

Season 2, Episode 6 | October 23, 2025

• Speakers: Senator Robin Wright Jones, Darrell Hudson, Reggie Tucker-Seeley, Speaker 1, Krystal Lee, Mandy LeBreche, J. Robin Moon

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:20

Hello and welcome back to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I am your host. Crystal Lee, and my co host is J. Robin Moon, associate director of research evaluation and dissemination for IRL. Hey, Robin. As you know, this season of promising practices, we are exploring the experiences, stories and lessons learned from our fellows, our IRL fellows and alumni. And today, we are so pleased to have representatives of cohort seven with us from Team St Louis. Welcome Senator Robin Wright-Jones, Reggie Tucker, Seeley and Daryl Hudson. Welcome. Friends.

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  01:10

Thank you so much for having us.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  01:14

Absolutely. Good afternoon.

J. Robin Moon 01:17

We’re so glad to have you with us today. Before we ask you to tell us about yourselves and your work. We invite you to engage with us in one of our signature IRL promising practices, which is to check in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building communities that collaborate effectively in the work towards health equity, and we know that you know this too. So at the end, at the beginning of our meetings, we do a quick check in to help us continuously build connections with you and in our beloved community. So here’s our first check in question today, if you could share one insight with your younger self, what would it be? I have so many I’m gonna start I would, I would tell my younger self to not take myself so seriously. There’s a between. There’s a difference between taking things seriously and taking myself seriously. I think I did most of the latter, and I’m going to toss it to you, Krystal.

Krystal Lee  02:31

Okay, I had one, and then I lost it. So let’s see what happens. I would tell myself, Oh, here it is. I would tell myself that there is no need to be so anxious about what’s going to happen in the next moment or the next day or in the future at whatever point, because whoever I need to be to deal with those things will emerge in time to deal with those things. So I would share that with myself in hopes of addressing my anxieties about, you know, the state of the world and and all of that. I will toss it to you, Senator Jones. Senator Wright-Jones.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  03:20

Of course you would! Share with my my younger self was a long time ago. I probably have had several selves since then, but the one thing that I think I would say across time was be comfortable in your skin and what you feel and believe, and be able and comfortable to communicate that. I think that’s very important. It’s good for self development, and I think it’s good for how people read you. You want that to be accurate, and you want to be, you know, comfortable and accurate about what you’re saying about your feelings. Okay, I’ll toss that to Darryl.

Darrell Hudson  04:02

 Well, I wish I could just take the ones that Krystal and Robin mentioned. I was thinking about this seriousness comment. So that was definitely true for me. I guess I would, I would say just being more confident in who I am, and as the kids say, “I’m him”. So I wish I could go to my like 18 or 19 or 20 year old self and say, “Look, you’re him”. Don’t Don’t worry about all the things that are ahead, trusting yourself and take advantage of what’s in front of you, but be confident in who you are. I guess Reggie’s next.

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  04:46

Yes, I think for me, all of the things that everyone has just said of course, but also, I think “enjoy the now”, one of the things that my that my husband said to me when we first started dating was that I was always waiting for the shoe to drop. And I think I would tell myself if, even if the shoe drops, you’re going to know how to handle it, because you always do. So it would be “enjoy the now”.

Krystal Lee  05:16

Awesome. Thank you all for sharing. How about we jump right in and Robin, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, and then you can popcorn it to one of your team members, and we’ll go from there.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  05:31

Okay, well, I’m a child of the 60s. First of all, I’m 75 years old, so I’ve seen a lot of things happen in this country and in my life. Thing number one, one of the things as a kid, I’m talking in the 50s, when I was like six, seven years old, I remember clearly, President Eisenhower. I remember the early Democratic and Republican conventions. I was, it was, it was mesmerizing to me. I paid close attention. Of course, we had a little bitty television screen those days. It was a 12 by 12, but I remember looking at and I remember being interested in it even as a kid. Then as I grew up, it’s like I want to help people who didn’t have the privileges. And when I say privileges, my parents. I’m an only child. I had a good life. My mother was a teacher. My father owned his own business. But there were so many of my friends, even at that time, who didn’t have those advantages. And it’s like, how can I help? What can I do to make life better for anybody? And that’s kind of been in my spirit all of my life. So through the 60s, of course, I was out on the street. I had a big afro like Angela Davis, okay, you know, I’ve I’ve been political, and my family and my parents would look at me like, Who is this child?

J. Robin Moon 06:51

 You must have worn it so beautifully….

Senator Robin Wright Jones  06:55

right? Okay? And even in college, and even as I got married and had children, I was active with my children’s school, always winding up in leadership somehow or whatever, not looking for it, always wanting to give, not necessarily looking to lead. But I saw that that was there, and I got comfortable with it, you know, being comfortable and being political. Still that remembrance of the political conventions, especially in ‘68 in Chicago with the Dems and Fannie Lou Hamer, said I didn’t come down here basically to waste time. And that’s that’s just intriguing to me. So I involved myself in Jimmy Carter’s campaign for president, for Bill Clinton’s campaign for president. That was very interesting. And then as time went on, I wound up being asked to run for state representative out of Saint Louis, which I did. It was an opportunity, a door that opened, and you get to eight years, basically, which I spent those eight years but then the Senate seat in my district open up, and I ran for that. So with that and all that I did, and all the committees and things that I served on, and especially being in the legislature, I had a lot that I could use in various places. And this opportunity presented itself when Darryl and Bettina Drake at Wash U had it, and Reggie reached out to everybody, and I thought it was a good opportunity to learn and to grow and to share and to make a difference in lives. So health equity, my goodness, is one of many things that need to be leveled out and need to be accessible in a supreme way. It needs to be good quality everything. And if we can work toward that and break these barriers down and get some equality going, I think that’s most important. So I think the work that we’re doing here is, is phenomenal work. Hope I didn’t take too long.

Krystal Lee  09:06

No, you’re fine. Reggie, how about you tell our listeners about yourself?

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  09:11

Sure. So hello, everyone. My name is Reggie Tucker Seeley. I’m the principal and owner of Health Equity Strategies and Solutions, a health equity consulting firm based in Los Angeles, California, that focuses on public health and health care delivery research, also advising and working with health and health care related organizations, departments, committees, coalitions. Focused on developing tools and resources for health and health care leaders, focusing on three specific topics, social determinants of health, defining, measuring and intervening on health disparities and health equity, strategy, development, implementation and evaluation. My path to health equity really started when I served on a commission for health advocacy and equity in the state of Rhode Island. So I was on the faculty at the Harvard School of Public Health and I was asked to teach a course, and I was, you know, scheduled to teach. I wanted to teach a course that a big scholar was already teaching. So I had to think of something else like, you know, I had to develop my own course and and serving on this commission, I realized that, well, first the commission was asked to or legislatively mandated, not asked. We were legislatively mandated to write our state’s health disparities report, and I realized I had no idea how to write a state health disparities report. But then I also thought, well, I trained at the Harvard School of Public Health. I’m having to develop this course if I don’t know how, chances are, our students don’t know how either, and they’re probably going to be asked to do this as they go out into the world, and so I developed a course called Measuring and Reporting Health Disparities. And in that course, I took students through the process of having to write. I wrote a three part case study that took students through the process of having to write a state level health disparities report. And in that experience, I realized that all the things that we talked about in academia, which we’ve been talking about for decades around health equity and health disparities. All of that information has not yet made it to the communities that really need it. And so that really started my journey and trying to figure out, how do we get all of these amazing tools and strategies and resources that are in academia to the communities that really need them? And now I’ll popcorn over to Darryl.

Darrell Hudson  11:26

Sure. Thanks, Reggie. Um, so I think for me, like I’ll start who I am. So I am Professor and Chair of Department of Health Behavior and Health Equity at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and also a research professor at Washington University in St Louis. Historically, my work has always been around health equity, even if we didn’t use that terminology then. And I will say I started, you know, my kind of origin story. My first classroom was where I grew up in Detroit, and the inequities that you see in a city like that, which has gone through a tremendous amount of renovation and uplift recently, but um historically, has been uniquely impacted by economics and racial racial residential segregation and other social and economic factors. So the things I saw, I couldn’t really articulate it at the time, just felt unjust, and I couldn’t really figure out what was going on. So like in my family and my community, I saw a tremendous amount of what I thought was just untreated mental health. And, you know, for folks who are old enough to remember Frazier, the sitcom. So I went off to college. I thought I was going to be black Frazier, and I’ll return to my community, and I would be a psychiatrist. And, you know, sit in and listen to people’s problems over the radio, back then, but now probably through a podcast. Then I went to, I had a few different pivots early in my career that were pretty impactful, but what I ultimately learned was that it’s really about social determinants of health. Is really what’s these upstream, what we call upstream or structural factors that drive inequities. And no matter what inequity you’re looking at or what outcome you’re looking at, whether it’s chronic disease or violence or you name it, a lot of it is driven by the upstream social determinants of health. And so that’s that’s still where I’m at, is trying to figure out how we can move the needle on those, those broader social terms of health and hopefully strive towards health equity.

Krystal Lee  13:50

Awesome. Thank you all for sharing. Um, our next question, and anybody who feels led to answer can go ahead and do so is, how would you describe your experience with the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program?

Senator Robin Wright Jones  14:07

I’ll start not being a researcher, that is a completely different viewpoint. Okay, mine is the community representative on this particular team. I’ve got deep background in it, obviously. And at present, I’m the ED for prostate cancer advocacy organization for the past 11 years, and I’ve learned a great deal from that alone. I say I know more about prostate cancer than I do about breast cancer. And fortunately, I haven’t had to fight that one, but knowing what I know and being able to share it in a program like this is totally invaluable. I’ve learned the nomenclature, which we’ll talk about later. I’ve learned the parts of research, what it means, where it comes from, where you want to go with it. I’ve been exposed to other people from other parts of the country, all the way across the country, that are obviously working on similar, similar issues of disparities in their community and what things are like there. And it’s just been a growth process for me, being in, you know, I’ve done a lot of things, I’ve taught school, and just many, many things in seven years, several different careers. But this has been an eye opener to look at what the research tower. I like to call it a tower. You’re in your ivory towers, okay, it’s interesting to see what you see from that level, and what you can do at my level, where the rubber meets the road, and what that collaboration can bring, how important that is. And even throughout this, I’ve asked Robin and others at the IRL and UMN as well, is, what are other major corporations like Johnson and Johnson? What are they doing similar to this? To address, you know, to address the issues in our society, which many of them are the reason some of these things are what they are. I’ve looked at “Titans, the rise of Wall Street”. Oh, my God, if you get an opportunity, look at it, it’s eight episodes, it’s all based on reality. It’s all true. But when you look at that, and look at the history, who’s involved, what presidents, names that we know well from Wall Street journeys, and how it is impacting our everyday lives, we may not think it but just the I call it the vagaries of the stock exchange. You know, all of a sudden, boom, something got sold, or something got bought, or it dipped and it rose. There’s reasons for that and and this particular the documentary series will tell you and fill in some gaps about the very things that we’re finding every day. Okay, I’ll throw it to Reggie this time.

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  17:05

I really enjoyed my IRL experience. I think just the structure of the program, the time that the program gave us as a team to really, you know, gel together and to learn how to work with each other. We had not worked together before. You know, I was familiar with Darrell’s work, but I had not met Darrell. And I had been introduced to Robin through my role. Prior to starting my consulting company, I had taken a leave of absence from my academic position at the time, which was assistant professor of Gerontology at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, to be the first vice president of Health Equity at Zero Prostate Cancer. And so that’s sort of the sort of prostate angle of the of the project. And so I was, I’d been introduced to Robin, I’d read Darrell’s work, but we had never worked together as a team. And so the thing I really appreciated about the IRL program is that the program gave us time to really build our team and to learn how to work with each other, to figure out, to talk about, you know, where our strengths were, and, you know, the specific components of the project that you know were really, you know, sort of well suited for, you know, what the strengths were that we brought to the to the table, and so I feel like we were really able to gel as a team before we had to, you know, sort of start working on the project. And so that was the that was the best part of the my experience of IRL. I would also say, just coming together and meeting the other teams, as Robin mentioned, you know, the other teams are working on, you know, disparities or health equity or related projects focused on addressing structural racism, but they’re likely in different domains. So we’re the only prostate cancer, you know, team and so other projects are working on things like, you know, homelessness or and now I don’t remember the other…

Senator Robin Wright Jones  18:59

Fresh water in Hawaii that’s another one….

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  19:00

Exactly! Fresh water in Hawaii, exactly. Thank you, Robin, yes. And so you know, hearing folks you know, trying to do work in their respective communities, and hearing about the strategies that that they’re using. So the the opportunity to come together as a team, and the time to build our team, but also the opportunity to come together as a larger cohort and to hear about all of the things that that other teams are working on as well. And now I’ll popcorn it over to Darryl.

Darrell Hudson  19:29

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Reggie, so I’ll cosign everything you said in terms of, like, the advantages, the runway, to create a team where you hadn’t worked together before. I think the opportunity to expand our networks and get to know people in other spaces, so you get to learn the content and substantive areas they’re working on, whether it’s environmental justice or housing or whatever the case may be. But I think especially right now, it’s really important to be able to touch base with people and just get a shot at. Arm shot in the arm. Get some energy. Get some inspiration, being able to learn what people are doing and see that folks are making progress. So sometimes, especially when you’re you know, sometimes academia, at least in my neck of the woods, a lot of times, can feel isolating. So being able to connect with folks who are doing really outstanding work. And learning about what they’re doing, the impact they’re making in their communities, is really important. And I think the other thing that is…  I’m really greatly appreciative of is the opportunity to get connected with so many different resources. So we got a chance to meet with folks from Academy Health, for example, so thinking about developing communication plans and how to communicate with different audiences, meetings that have outstanding panelists of people who write for different newspapers, like the Washington Post, or thinking about folks who are thinking about framing. So Reggie probably talk about the impact of the Frameworks Institute, the thinking that we’ve had more recently, and finding some of the work that we’ve some of the results that we’ve had and some of the data we’ve collected so far. So those are resources that are really hard to quantify. So we’re really grateful for the opportunity.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  21:21

I also think the team building side of it is great, because we’re all in three different parts of the country, so we physically only met, mainly when we were coming to an IRL session. And we’ve a couple of times, you know, Reggie’s come in, and now that Darryl is up north, basically they’d have to come in for us to do a face to face, we get a lot done, but generally Friday at noon is our time to meet. And you know, we’ve done well, considering we’ve got 1000s of miles between us. You know…

J. Robin Moon 21:51

Yeah, your cohort is also lucky to be past the pandemic that we were actually able to do that. Your team has already started talking about your IRL project. So the question now is specifically about your project. The title of your project is “Prostate Cancer Patient Healthcare, Provider and Healthcare System Perspectives and Equity in the Cancer Care Delivery System in St Louis”. So tell us about your project from where you are. So like Robin, by the way, you are the Robin from the 60s. So you are the Robin and I’m the second Robin. Tell us about the community where your research is based, and maybe Reggie and Daryl share with us, from your specific role as one of the two research partners, what the project meant to you. Would you start with maybe Robin.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  22:49

Okay, I do say I’m the oldest Robin. I mean, you know any other Robins anywhere near me? Maybe at 40 something, but in the

J. Robin Moon 22:58

In the most complimentary way…

Senator Robin Wright Jones  22:59

okay, alright, absolutely okay. Saint Louis, Missouri. Oh, my God, I have to admit, I call it Saint Louis misery, because Missouri… At one time, we were a bellwether state. They could come to us to we could determine who’s going to be the next president. We were a very democratic state, but gays, guns and abortion killed that, and we are now deeply, deeply Republican conservative, MAGA deeply. And it’s showing in everything, absolutely everything – health equity, Of course. Our population in 1950 was 800,000 we are now down to about 250,000 so we are not a large city anymore, and which affects the CDBG money that we get from the federal government. If you get any money…

J. Robin Moon 23:53

CDBG is a block grant…?

Senator Robin Wright Jones  23:57

Community Development Block Grant, and it’s broken down by the size of your community, large cities and medium cities and so forth. So that money has, you know, dwindled across time, well, especially over the past 10 years, for sure. We have the another thing about Missouri is that the majority of the population only has a high school education, which means most of the people in the state haven’t been anywhere. Even when I first ran for office, and our class at that time in 2000 we did a tour of the state to look at the facilities and talk to different people. When we got down into the lower part of the state, in the middle is considered a wilderness, because there are less than 15 people per square mile, okay, and it was such a dramatic difference from urban, even to suburban and even to rural, but to the wilderness area, what the needs were, who we were talking to and about what. Even how we were served. It’s was so interesting. We’ve gotten steak and potato and lobster in one area. We actually got bologna and cheese sandwiches in the wilderness area. Okay, it was interesting. That’s all they had. They thought that’s, you know, all we needed. But here in the city, our population is predominantly black. We’re having a lot of issues with our education system. When the tornado came in, it tore up 15 schools, the majority of them on the north side of city, which is the African American side, and they have since closed those schools, moved those teachers and those students to other schools in the city, while they, quote, unquote, “repair”. And the damage wasn’t that bad. It was roof and windows. It could have been done. One of our major high schools, historical high schools, schools, Sumner High School, first African American High School on the west side of the Mississippi only had roof damage, and it’s like and it was slated to be done anyway, but they shut that down too. So that has created a groundswell. There’s consistently a groundswell of inequity across the board in the city of Saint Louis. So, you know, because of social determinants of health, we obviously black men have a higher rate of incidence and death. And what we’re doing is very helpful. What Wash U does is very helpful. They have a van now dedicated to prostate cancer testing that they use in their region, which is St Louis and as well as in the Illinois area. So that those are the factors that we’re working against. And we’re talking to the doctors, the patients, the providers, the administrators, what is, what do you think and what can we do to change it? You know? What? What do you think we can do to change it so that that’s kind of what we’re working in, that’s what we’re working against. Okay, okay, I’m gonna throw it to Reggie.

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  27:11

Okay. And so we are so excited about this project, the opportunity to talk to not only prostate cancer patients, but also healthcare providers and healthcare system administrators to address the barriers that black men face as they navigate the prostate cancer care delivery system in St Louis. And the idea for this project really came from a project that I worked on a few years ago when I was at USC, and I was working with, I was on this social determinants of health task force for LA County, and in that task force, we were charged with understanding how the health care delivery system, specifically the public health care delivery system in Los Angeles, was screening for social determinants, and we were about to roll out universal screening, but we realized we had no idea what was happening at the time. And so the the lead for this project was an emergency room physician, Dr Brina Tara, and she and I developed a project where we not only talk to patients about screening for social needs, but we also talked to providers and healthcare system administrators. And it was that sort of multi-level project which really started me thinking about the importance of not only addressing sort of what people are experiencing as they’re navigating the system, but also talking to the people who can make some changes when you encounter the barriers. Because I have a background in accounting, and it wasn’t until we talked to the Chief Financial Officer of the of the system that we understood why social determinants of health related pilot projects were not moving forward, and it was primarily because the the folks in the finance office were not part of the conversations around the implementation of those of those projects, those pilot projects. And so I’ll, I’ll share the paper that that we wrote from from that project, because it might be be helpful to your to your listeners, but, but that that idea of sort of talking to patients, providers and healthcare system administrators, really motivated me to think about for all of my future projects, that it is important to sort of include those multiple levels. I feel like we in public health often talk about multi level frameworks and multi level, you know, conceptual models, but when we get to the place of actually doing the research and developing interventions, that can be a bit more challenging. And so we are so excited that we’ve had the opportunity to talk to patients. We’ve had a couple of we’ve had several interviews with providers and several interviews with healthcare system administrators in St Louis. I’m just looking forward to the findings that we uncover to hopefully address some of the barriers that black men are facing as they’re navigating their prostate cancer journey.

J. Robin Moon 29:46

The true systems level change.

Krystal Lee  29:50

Yeah. Darryl, how about you start telling us about the promising practices or practice that has emerged from your IRL project?

Darrell Hudson  30:04

Well, there’s a few different things. I think one of the biggest things that we’ve learned is that there is a promising practice that Robin heads, which is the Empowerment Network in St Louis. And so the work that’s occurring there, providing support for men who have cancer, prostate cancer, specifically, there’s tremendous resources and care towards those men, so that’s something to build on. And then talking to people who have participated in those groups, they talk about how meaningful that practice has been, both from, again, different levels of support. So social support, navigation, knowledge, clarity about what’s happening, something that is really scary and life altering, and so being able to demystify what’s happening in care. And that’s kind of at the crux of what we’re trying to do in the project, is to try to figure out what are some of the elements of equitable care delivery for black men who have prostate cancer. And that’s what we’ve kind of mainly focused on or been able to uncover, is the effectiveness of having a group like the Empowerment Network. I think the other stuff that we’ve been able to figure out, and this is these are things that you know, are not unique to St Louis or to this project, but it’s difficult to catch people who are outside of those networks. So whenever you’re trying to get folks who are, you know, underserved, whatever word you want to put in there, underserved, not connected, that’s still a challenge. So finding people who are outside that network, as effective as it is, that’s always a challenge. To get people engaged from a preventive standpoint or from a treatment standpoint. So I think that’s another thing that we have to I don’t think that’s a promising practice, per se, but just thinking about ways that we can engage different groups of people, I think the other thing that’s related to prostate cancer is it’s a little bit more tricky to screen for and how follow up compared to, say, breast cancer. And so some of the things that we have to think about with our you know, our respondents that we talked to, including our providers and our administrators, sharing this out to others, is thinking about, how do we figure out how to get men connected to primary care? Because if you don’t have a primary care physician, then it’s very difficult to just, you know, find someone, to find a way to navigate really complicated settings. So those are some of the key takeaways that you know that, at least in my estimation, to pull down and think about in development of practices that can be disseminated more widely.

J. Robin Moon 33:13

Well, speaking of your dissemination, next month, we will have our annual, final Annual Meeting conference in Minneapolis, and you will be graduating. So the program will end looking towards the future. What do you think, maybe one of you can answer this question. What do you think are your next steps? Have you started talking about working together again, or, if not, what’s next? How do you see the lessons you’ve learned from IRL being applied to the work towards health equity for the population you work for and for all?

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  33:54

I think our the structure of our project, that is that where we’re talking to prostate cancer patients, we’re talking to healthcare providers and we’re talking to healthcare system administrators. Hopefully we can set up, or we can, you know, put out there a model for doing this kind of research. And for me doing this kind of work going forward, that is the model that I want to continuously use. That is not just talking to patients, or not just talking to people, you know, running a healthcare delivery system, but talking to all three to get a sense of, you know, how do we address the barriers that black men are facing? And as I’m aging myself and I’m having to navigate the healthcare delivery system, and I often say, if I’m struggling with navigating the system, and I study it like I can’t imagine what the folks who aren’t so steeped in the processes are managing. And so what I’m going to take with me and my future projects is a desire to ensure that we consistently have conversations with all of those levels, if we are indeed to create health equity for for black men specifically, but just everyone in general, in terms. Of their ability to successfully navigate the healthcare delivery system in this country.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  35:07

I’ll go next. Uh, for First of all, I am I have resigned from the Empowerment Network effective October 31. I’ve been there for 11 years. This will be my third retirement, our fourth retirement in life. Okay, so it’s time. It’s just time. Nothing’s wrong. It’s a great organization. We’re doing great things, but it’s just time for me. I just want to pursue me and pursue I am a real estate broker. I want to delve back into real estate. Delve back into politics. My chief of staff and my campaign manager is running for a Senate seat. I need to be involved in that campaign, and I can’t do it from a nonprofit. So that’s another reason. That’s not the reason, but that’s another reason why. And I also have been asked by several smaller organizations, if I would write them some grants. So do it all day long. Okay, pretty successful at it. So it’s like, okay, I can do that. So, but I’m open to if Reggie or Darryl should call me and say, Can you would you? Could you? Absolutely! If they needed to anything, you’re so welcome. I have great contacts. I mean, you know, I know everybody in the city. I know the governor. We all serve to the governor, Josh Holly, Eric Smith and I. We all serve together in the House and the Senate. So I know them by first name, okay? And we even when I would go to zeros legislative weekend in Washington. I’d go see em, you know, and they are open to prostate cancer issues, because they all have it in their family somewhere, Father, uncle, brother. So, you know, I again what I can do to help, I’ll be more than happy to do so, but let me I’ll say this about what is going on with 10 just so. And I guess I could put it in the notes too. Two things. Mel V, our founder, did a podcast for Siteman. Very interesting podcast from his perspective. He’s a, well, 18 year survivor, but he had a recurrence this spring, and he went through chemo, and he’s got taken meds, and he’s doing well, uh, his numbers are back down, but his perspective, and he’s been writing basically since he was diagnosed 18 years ago, and this was kind of his way of healing and walking the journey. He did a book, little book about his writings. We just compiled it during the pandemic, since we were working from home, but that podcast had 47,000 views within a matter of days. He just came up about a week and a half ago. So that’s something to look at when you listening, Wanting to hear from a survivor, an African American man with Mel will be 72 so, you know, he was in his late 60s. Math wasn’t my strongest subject. But anyway, he, you know, he’s got good, good insight. And also, we were reached by survivor net. I don’t know if you’re familiar with survivornet.com they are a platform, streaming platform that focuses on all cancers, and they come around the country to talk to cancer survivors, and Seidman put them in touch with Mel V and they are coming the first weekend of September to spend the weekend with the walk. We’re going to start with the zero walk. We’re going to come to the office and just a whole three days worth of videoing of him, his wife, myself, the support our our members, and it will run on their survivor NET platform. It’ll be like a 10 minute documentary about what we do, what melvie does, and deep dive film are the producers, but they do all kinds of things. There’s one now that’s streaming called Fire boys, which I’ve seen, which is about the firemen who fought the fires in California. So this is the kind of thing they do. And if they send us something, I’m sure when it’s done, I will certainly share it with everybody, but those are the kinds of things that we look at to get the word out. You know, we do billboards. This one this year, is a wonderful billboard that says this is what beating prostate cancer looks like. And it’s two of our four of our members, Mel V being one men who have survived for many years, decades. And we’re thinking about branding that actually, that I use that slogan, this is what democracy looks like when I was running for Senate. So I think this is what beating prostate cancer looks like. You got four African American men healthy, looking well on a billboard that says a lot, that says an awful lot, so that that’s what I’ll be doing starting November 1.

J. Robin Moon 40:09

just a couple of things.

Krystal Lee  40:13

Not that much! You’ll be alright. So one of our, one of the things that we like to have folks talk about is, you know, the impact of the work that we are doing, and not just on our communities, but also on ourselves. So one of our core beliefs as this podcast team is summed up in the words of Octavia Butler, when she says, “All that you touch, you change, and all that you change changes you”. So will you please tell us how the IRL program, our beloved community, has changed you, and how do you think you have changed the program or your communities?

Darrell Hudson  40:56

That’s a really good question. It’s hard to be in the lightning round with something like that. But I think that the the biggest you know impact as I [inaudible] like the Octavia Butler quote, is again being in community with others, whether they’re scholars or community members leaders, who are working shoulder to shoulder. And I think that’s to me, if I had think about the broader across seven cohorts and all these different teams across the country, I think that’s truly the biggest takeaway, I would say, for the IR program in general, is having a cadre of folks who are trained to think about these issues, who’ve developed a suite of skills and connections so that we can call upon each other. And we know that projects end. We know that funding goes away. Priorities change, but the relationships are sustainable, I think the, again, the capacity that’s been built by IRL and community connections are phenomenal, lots of different people at different institutions around the country. So I think, to me, that’s the biggest thing, and just being able to pour into that community and also to get again, take away from it as well. So to me, that’s the biggest impact I could say that I’ve experienced with IRL

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  42:27

I think for me, two things that I’ve learned or that have impacted me, is the idea that language matters and stories matter. I think the storytelling workshops that you guys prepared for us from Storytellers for Change, uh, Luis Ortega, that was one of the most sort of, you know, life changing experiences for me in terms of, you know, learning how to tell better stories and the importance of stories. I feel like, you know, as an as a former academic, I think I’ll always have a foot sort of in that, in that space. But what IRL has helped me do, and what Robin has helped me do in particular, is to be very cognizant of when I am sort of, you know, going into academic speak, because she will quickly bring us back down to making sure that we are describing things in the way that a community member will understand and so. So for me, that has been the biggest learning is, you know, sort of language matters, making sure everyone understands what you’re saying, and then the importance of stories in the places where we’re working,

J. Robin Moon 43:31

Lest, the audience gets confused with which Robin. Anytime the credit is attributed, we’re talking about Senator Robin Wright-Jones, not me.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  43:42

Um, the whole process. Well, first, I learned a lot about research. I enjoyed that from the two of them. I enjoyed the fact that Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has the heart, enough to go out into the country and find out about these disparities for seven different cohorts. That is quite an investment of time and treasure and talent, and I respect it, and it’s wonderful. How, how did it impact me? Well again, to know that there is such a thing that’s happening, and I hope that, you know, Robert Wood Johnson can encourage other foundations to do similarly. We need this type of look at our communities, all of our communities, the disabled community, the indigenous community, the the gay lesbian community, anybody that’s under siege, which almost is everybody these days. There needs to be an influx of dollars and resources to start a conversation and make a change and make a difference. That that’s what I you know. In the end, I hope I left that. You know, go check with others, big corporations. When you look at Titans: The the rise of Wall Street, there’s plenty of them to go to and who can make a difference. And for me, it’s, it’s just been an eye opening experience. Like I said, I’m Saint Louis, Missouri, Misery. You know the, to have a conversation up and above our issues here, from other places and again, exposed to others who’ve done other things is really been good. I have enjoyed it. I enjoyed the sessions. Every time we went. It was great, great locations and great food, always, always great food and great sessions. All of the sessions were always good.

J. Robin Moon 45:47

Thank you. Speaking of great food, final question, back to one of our promising practices. We’re going to ask you to talk about, we’re going to check out now.  Working towards equity, and again, systems of oppression, it takes a big toll. Can you share with our listeners how you engage in self care as you do this difficult work? Feeding yourselves with good food is one…

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  46:19

I’m happy to jump in. As I mentioned, I live in Los Angeles, which is the place of almost eternal sunshine. And so one of the things that I try to do is at lunchtime, and I work 100% at home. So one of the things I try to do every day, or at least four times a week, is to go on a walk in my neighborhood during lunch. And I call that my sun therapy. And I take about a 30 to 45 minute walk in my neighborhood, and I try to get sun therapy as often as I can. And then on the weekends, we live close to a couple of hiking trails, and so I also try to get out on the weekends as well. So taking full advantage of living in the Sunshine State and living in Los Angeles, geting my sun therapy is my form of self care.

J. Robin Moon 47:03

It’s lovely. Reggie.

Darrell Hudson  47:08

Yeah, I’ll chime in. So another shout out to IRL, which was the book club that we had the Four Pivots actually assigned that to all of our incoming mph students in my department. Oh, really. So we just debriefed about it yesterday during orientation. So definitely, for for listeners, I would say that’s a, no pun intended, a pivotal book to take a look at the four pivots and so self care and rest and being  restored, healing, all those things are at the crux of the Four Pivots, and I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the you know, I guess it’s been about a year and a half since we were first exposed to that text and again, sharing it with students, and they’re wrestling with these questions like rest, how do we carve out time for rest? And how do we make sure that we’re doing our internal work so that mirror versus analysis pivot, for example. So those are all things that I’ve been trying to take in. So I would just cite that book and all the things that are in it are ways that I’m trying to work on, on self care.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  48:25

Oh, he mentioned the book. I’m a reader. I can sit down with a book and a cup of tea in a comfortable chair and read three or four books at a time. It just takes my mind away from, you know, the daily and I don’t read romance. I mean, I read real stuff. Okay, I’m not doing Romance.

Senator Robin Wright Jones  48:53

So reading it and I used to bike. Well, I’ve got five grandchildren, so back in the day, when they were younger, we go to the park and bike around the park, which I do like that, but I do more walking now, just for age purposes. You know, I don’t want to fall out anywhere, and nobody knows. I’m not wearing one of those things yet. I don’t want to wear one of those where I had to punch the button and try not to do that. But I have a park nearby that I can walk around and, you know, it’s, it’s, and, like you say, get your sun and fresh air. Drink good water. I like to cook. So I don’t do the fried foods so much like I used to, just more, you know, stir fry type things. So any outdoors, reading and a good meal, good healthy meal, I think that that’s, that’s the best thing I know. Yeah, walking and eating walking, eating and reading and what can I say?

J. Robin Moon 49:46

Sounds like all the right thing to do. Team, Saint Louis, Robin, Reggie and Darrel. Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us today. We deeply appreciate your insights.

Reggie Tucker-Seeley  49:59

Thanks so much for having us.

Krystal Lee  50:01

Thank you all for being with us. Thank you. Thank you, and also thank you to our listeners. Listeners, we would love to hear from you, what promising practices are you using in your work to achieve health equity? Find us on the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders LinkedIn page, where you can share your thoughts, ideas, promising practices, or leave questions for the team. And don’t forget to subscribe to promising practices for health equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again for joining us on this journey where every step we take brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time….

Mandy LeBreche  50:48

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

A Conversation with Team Hawai’i (Waimānalo) (Cohort 3)

Season 2, Episode 5 | October 9, 2025

• Speakers: Ted Radovich, Krystal Lee, Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, Mandy LeBreche, Cody Cotton, and Jane Chung

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:21

Hello and welcome back to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m your host, Krystal Lee and my co-host today is the illustrious Cody Cotton Co-Director of IRL. Hey, Cody.

This season of promising practices, we are exploring the experiences, stories and lessons learned by our IRL fellows and alumni. And today, we are so pleased to have alumni from cohort three with us. Fellows from Team Waimanalo, Hawaii, I would love to for you to help me, Cody, welcome Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, Jane Chung-Do and Ted Radovich. hey guys. Hey friends.

Ted Radovich  01:12

Aloha, awesome.

Cody Cotton  01:15

So, as Krystal just mentioned, we’re glad to have you with us today, before we ask to tell us anything about yourself or your work, we want to invite you all to engage in one of our signature IRL promising practices. So checking in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building communities, and more than anything, towards health equity. So at the beginning of our meetings, we do a quick check in. Sometimes, it’s quick, sometimes it takes a little bit of time, but we’re going to make sure this is quick, and then it focuses on building connections in our beloved community. So here’s the check in for today. What is one thing that is quietly or loudly bringing you joy today?

Krystal Lee  01:58

So one of the things that I have been doing this year is thinking differently about my garden. I used to grow, you know, plants and vegetables from my home country, from Jamaica, and this year, the garden is not doing very well, but I had a kind of shift in the way I’ve been thinking about it. And, you know, the garden is doing what it can do, and I just like I am doing the best that I can do, and I have decided to approach it with an attitude of gratitude for whatever it is able to do for me this year, and this year, we’ve been focusing on flowers more so than the actual edible edible plants. So I am in the process of setting up a pollinator garden in my backyard. One of my neighbors mentioned that when he was growing up, there used to be monarch butterflies everywhere in this neighborhood. He’s lived here his entire life, and he has watched the monarch butterfly population decrease all these years. And I’m sure I’m doing my part to try to get the pollinators back, and so I’m approaching my garden a little bit differently, and it is really bringing me joy to see bumblebees coming around and interacting with my flowers and plants, and that’s what’s quietly bringing me joy. Cody, how about you?

Cody Cotton  03:15

Love that love that usually I would say my baby girl, she turned six months in two days. Um, however, was taking it by storm right now. Is my two little dudes getting ready to go off to school next week. Mini vacations. Here we come every single day. So I love having everyone here for the summer, but I am also looking forward to having the house be a little bit more quieter. So that’s what’s bringing me joy right now. Loudly, bringing me joy right now. Alright, Ilima, I am throwing it towards you.

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  03:48

Aloha. Nui kako today, looking out the window and seeing some gray skies, but also knowing that the sun is going to rise. And I’m looking at Mount Olomana, which I was born and raised around and got to hike from a very young age. It’s bringing me joy today, because I’m at home in my house. I just returned from a trip a couple days ago, and so I’m happy to be home in the kingdom of Hawaii. Mahalo. I’ll throw it to Jane.

Jane Chung  04:15

Aloha, everybody. So great question, Mimi, thanks Krystal for going first so we could think about it. But both my kids started school pretty recently, and I now have a fifth grader and an eighth grader, so they’re both in that transition year where they’re getting ready for middle school and high school, so this year, I think is going to be a very pivotal year for them. And, yeah, it’s it’s a joy, but it’s also kind of heartbreaking to watch your kids grow up so quickly, so just kind of grappling with that as a parent, Okay. 

Ted Radovich  04:50

hello again. Well, I guess I’m fortunate that there’s a number of things that I could pick. I’ll keep with the family theme. My son has decided… He’s 22 and recently, he’s decided that he wants to study agriculture here at the university. And so he’s, yeah, so he’s he’s on board. He’s working at the research station where we do a lot of our work now, and has really seems to be coming into his own. And we have four kids, and he’s the oldest. And so it gives me hope that the pipeline is moving. And while I agree with Jane about, you know, it’s a little bit sad that the kids are growing up, I’m also anticipating things getting quieter as, again, everybody moves through the pipeline and and we have less people in the house. And my daughter, one of my daughters, this morning, I was not handling any situation very gracefully, and she helped remind me we know that it’s important to both model good behavior and also that we can learn from our kids, sometimes patience and calm. She’s often the more mature of the two of us. So I was grateful for her, her lesson this morning. So So I also have some quiet joy for my family this morning.

Krystal Lee  06:07

Awesome. Thank you all for sharing. Thank you. So how about we jump right in and ask you each to tell us a little about yourselves. You can introduce yourselves, and then you can popcorn it to other members of your team to quickly tell us who you are and how you approach this work. Let’s start with Jane.

Jane Chung  06:26

Alright, so my name is Jane Chung-Do. I am a professor and the Associate Chair of the Department of Public Health Sciences at University of Hawaii at Manoa. I am a 1.5 Korean American immigrant moved I was born in Seoul, Korea, and moved over to Hawaii when I was six years old with my family. So I’m a settler here. I am in public health. Got my Masters and Doctorate in Public Health at University of Hawaii, and have been working in Waimanalo with Waimanalo since 2006 I think, and, yeah, the work has been just very meaningful, meaningful for me and transformative for me and my family and the work I do and how I see public health and what else. I’m also a mother. I’m an ocean lover. I love the ocean, I think that’s also been very pivotal in shaping who I am and how I work with communities, and the lessons I learned from the ocean are very similar to the lessons I learned in community. So yeah, happy to be here. I’m very proud to be a part of this team. I’ll popcorn over to Ilima

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  07:40

Aloha. I’m Ilima Ho-Lastimosa from Waimanalo, Hawaii. I’m a mom, I’m a widow. I’m also a grandma. I’m a sister, auntie, cousin, and I have lots and lots of ohana. Come from a very big line of Kanaka, Hawaii. My family actually is traced back to 400 BC in China as well. I’m a scholar today. I guess I really am a island person, but I’m a student. I’m a PhD student in Social Welfare at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and I’m also, because of the two of my teammates, an assistant faculty member at UH Manoa. Now, so very privileged to be in this realm, in this world view, I guess you could say, because it was never a part of my journey growing up, or even thinking that I could go to college. And today, I guess I’m a lifelong learner now, and I look forward to my grandbaby coming at the end of the year. Mahalo, Ted, your turn.

Ted Radovich  08:44

All right, let me see. Okay, my mics off. Oh, well, again. Ted Radovich, born and raised in Waimanalo, Hawaii, I mentioned that I’m a husband and a father, a professor here at U H. I’m chair of our department Tropical Plant and Soil Sciences. That’s an honor that I’ve recently received. I am a food producer. That’s I think that food and being able to produce my own food is something that really was a really motivated me in my career choices moving forward and focusing on really developing my own skill set so that I can contribute in whatever way I can to making our home here in Hawaii more food secure, self sufficient. We used to be a long time ago, and now we’re we’re pretty far away from that, and so feeding our community together is really what what drives me and really has been the focus of my since high school, is FFA all the way through college and I went, I left Hawaii a couple of times just long enough to, you know, try to learn how to serve my home better. So I did serve in Peace Corps a couple of years in West Africa as an agroforestry volunteer. And I did four years in Ohio for my PhD, but all of that was to come home and see see what I could do. And I’ve been blessed to have a lot of able to work with a lot of folks, especially these two here, to really push forward some of the things that we want to do with regard to food sovereignty, food security and just building our community.

Cody Cotton  10:24

Love that, love that. And Ted, actually, since you just went I’m actually going to start with you, so I’m giving you some time to think about it. But what, what made you all get off into this work of health equity? And then also, what does health equity look like to you?

Ted Radovich  10:40

That’s a good question. And actually, that’s one of the things that, really, I personally have, you know, it’s been an opportunity for me to grow because I come from agriculture. And while, I guess, intuitively knew the link between food, good food, and health, really, my focus has always been food production and how to do that in a way that minimizes negative impacts, maximizes regenerative activities and things. So health equity is not something I thought much until I really became involved with Robert Wood Johnson and IRL and I think we’ve come together. Because if you think about a food equity is, or, excuse me, health equity is very much a transdisciplinary thing, and so, you know, as somebody focused on food production, I have learned quite a bit about number one, how that is important and integral and contributes to health equity, but also how, how much more is out there that I need to learn and participation in the fellowship has, I still got a long way to go, but certainly has helped me move forward quite a bit and again, as well as my partnership with public health and my colleagues who are involved with the broader issues of health equity.

Cody Cotton  12:00

Thank you Ted. Appreciate that. Alright, I’m looking at you, Jane.

Jane Chung  12:05

Thanks for giving me time to think about this. So I would say I’ve always been interested in health, and for a while I thought, you know, the only careers I knew of were clinical, right? Being a doctor, being a nurse, being a pharmacist, and I knew that wasn’t right for me. So it took me a while to find public health. And so when I was looking for a graduate program, and I knew I wanted to be home, and when I returned to Hawaii and found public health, I was like, This is it! This is I want to do community work. I really felt in my heart from being able to travel and live in different parts of the world. I also realized through that that culture is such a big part of who we are and how we also stay healthy. And so it wasn’t really though, until I met folks in Waimanalo in 2006 I started my masters in 2006 and I’ve had a graduate research assistantship, and that was with the API center that was funded by CDC. I was really fortunate to get that GAship, still not really understanding what health equity could look like in Hawaii, and that’s actually when I met Ilima and a lot of other folks too in the community were just doing these, like amazing grassroots initiatives that were just so organic and so rooted. And that was really when I thought, this is public health, this is health equity, right, involving the community being grounded in community, and I just kind of fell in love, and I’ve been tagging along with these folks for since then, you know, and seeing each other go through a lot of life milestones and grief and joys, and, yeah, the community continues to amaze me, and I feel like a lot of people are doing health equity work without calling it health equity, right? Like these terms, it’s just life, it’s just what you do. It’s what’s pono, it’s that’s uplifting the lahui, which is, you know, the Hawaiian community. And so, yeah, I think it’s interesting, because I’m here, I’m learning these academic terms right in academia through grad school, and you know the things that we do in the ivory tower. But I see the community just doing it, right. They’re just doing it without getting, overthinking it. They just know, because they know the community. So that’s where I see the health equity work being done, and that’s where I learned what health equity is. But I also have seen health equity like put into action, because sometimes we talk about it too much without doing the action, and that’s one of the lessons I’ve learned. Like you just do it. That’s what the community wants. You do it, figure it out. And I’m an overthinker. And so I like to plan. I like to over plan. And so it’s really taught me to just go with the waves, go with the flow, and take the follow the community. The community got it and they have they should take the lead and where to follow and to support. 

Cody Cotton  15:20

I love that I took that as a way of being. I love that. I love that. Ilima, throwing it your way.

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  15:29

Okay. I love that Jane mentions about the ocean and going with the flow. And in Hawaii, that is to Nalu, which is to surf, and which is to adjust. And so I’ve had to adjust a lot because I’m really not an academic. I’m a community person that was told by academia that I wasn’t good enough when I didn’t have a college degree, and I didn’t know any of the terms. I don’t know what is health equity, I didn’t know what is agriculture or public health or social work. That’s not my terms. Life is my term, that the the learning is in the doing and the living, and that was where I came from, and that is what I bring to the table. I don’t really have a plan. I have a direction and I have a end goal. But, you know, really just doing all of the steps to get there is, is really the equity that that I look for in life and in my journey and as a community person from my community of Waimanalo, and especially within the Hawaiian community, because a lot of the things that we initiated in my community of Waimanalo, which is a very predominantly Hawaiian community, and able to bring it to other Hawaiian communities, is the equity is. But it was always the plan. It was always my plan was to go into Hawaiian communities and bring goodness and aloha back, because a lot of it is lost, and we have a lot of turmoil within our own communities, especially in Hawaii now, a lot of violence and so relearning, revisiting, reimagining what health is, has been really easy. And the action was a little bit hard in the beginning, maybe almost 20 Well, 20 years ago for me, for sure. But you know, things that we want to implement now, because it’s been such a two decades of doing this action and this work, I think is happening, and I really appreciate IRL giving us the opportunity to be present at the table, to learn about health equity and really implement a lot of the things. And I think COVID was one of the best things that happened to our community, because we got to re-implement the things that we already know, know in our DNA, to just happen, you know, and and it’s lived, and it’s persisted, and it’s consistent and it’s living, and it’s bringing the equity back to our community. So Mahalo.

Krystal Lee  17:54

Awesome. Thank you all for sharing your journeys into into health equity work and your perceptions of what healthy, health equity can look like, Ilima, I’m going to ask you to tell us, you know, because I’ve heard, I heard a couple things that you all said which stood out to me. One was Jane said that culture is part of how we stay healthy, which I think is a really powerful statement. And then Ilima talked about how health equity has to be grounded in community, and that health equity is really uplifting the community and learning from the community and following the community’s lead, and that’s something that we’ve heard from other other teams that we’ve interviewed so far. So Ilima, I wonder if you can tell us about your project and about the community where your research is based. I know your project is called “Rebuilding Indigenous Food Systems in Rural Native Hawaii”. Tell us about the project and about the community where your research is based.

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  18:53

You know, I really would like to start with something else. I just watched. I don’t know if you guys saw chief of war yet, but it’s talking about the history of Hawaii and how a Kamehameha brought the the kingdom together. And I think that’s health equity and Kaina Makua. I just watched a little snippet that he he played Kamehameha. He’s a great friend, and he’s a I know warrior for sure, but he talked about how he never was a fan of Kamehameha, and he didn’t like his ways, but when he became played the role of Kamehameha, he got to understand how Kamehameha thought was as to bringing everybody together, to live in the same way, and to really persist as Kanaka, as Hawaiians. And so I think that’s really what the goal was for Kanaka like me to do, was to bring everybody together, learn us together, and the community leading, and I represent the community, and I listen to the community, and we all kind of have the same ideas, and just putting it into practice, was a difficult part before, but I think with the leverage of all of the things that we learned since we started, really makes a difference in the equity is because people now they listen. Because before we had no platform, no friends, no fans, no input, right? And today, it’s a different story. And so we just gotta lead from that space into the bigger arena of health equity. And I don’t know if I answered your question, but that’s my answer. Mahalo,

Krystal Lee  20:31

Thanks Ilima. Ted, you want to tell us a little bit about the project and the community where it’s based?

Ted Radovich  20:38

Yeah, so the project is centered around aquaponics to bring community together. And aquaponics, for those who don’t know, is kind of the combination aquaculture and hydroponics, and then using the fish water as the nutrient source for the plants. So you end up dramatically saving on water the way it’s set up, and you save considerably on fertilizer and other inputs. I think there, there was an effort to really bring this to the commercial agricultural industry, and Ilima was engaged with that process and saw the the huge potential, potential for community development with this, with this tool, for multiple reasons. A large part is the connection between water and fish and land plants. And we have a traditional natural resource management unit. It’s called ahupua mountain to the to the ocean. And it just it resonated dramatically with our community. And Ilima just built that up with, you know, very little support, initially, and was able to find that to push it forward. It paralleled, but outgrew the actual efforts. Really the value of aquaponics, I think, to our communities, it goes far beyond the commercial income generation, and really builds on all kinds of things. And then the partnership with Jane brought in the public health, health metrics, measures. Malama was born, and that’s the project. And again, with regard to community, what I noticed years ago was that there were a lot of home garden activities that that would pop up and these garden they’re usually garden beds, or, you know, things like that that would be installed in people’s yards, and they would be, you know, defunct within a year, probably. But as we were watching Ilima’s program and installation of aquaponic units in folks yards, we saw that that, you know, they were more likely to persist for a number of reasons. The resonance with the Aqua concept is certainly one of them. But also, there’s just enough. There’s just enough engineering kind of, you know, just enough to engage folks who are interested in that you have the fish and kids, especially, but everybody kind of is fond of the fish, and so there’s something for everybody, and it’s simple enough to deal with issues as they as they arise, especially if the community supports each other. So yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of reasons why aquaponics, and aquaponics, in the way that Ilima developed the program, resonates very strongly with our community. And you know, in addition to community building, there’s real, tangible benefits that Jane can tell you about with regard to health and health metrics, etc. So…

Cody Cotton  23:27

Thank you for sharing, actually, speaking of that, and I’ve heard the dimension of community. I heard the mention of different things, and I want to take a small pivot. Can you tell us a promising practice or practices that has emerged from the IRL project?

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  23:46

Okay, I’m gonna answer. And you know, our aquaponics project was just aquaponics, and I think the clinical side emerged just before we became IRL. And I’m not used to clinicals and but I have to say that people that were in aquaponics prior to this and learned about the clinicals after are very interested in in the clinical side, which is amazing to me as a Hawaiian woman, because I really don’t go to the doctor. I had to go to the doctor, yesterday. I went to the doctor twice in 10 years. And yet the kupuna are always asking, can I participate? And I said no, because you already did your aquaponics project prior to the clinicals, but they but they want it for their community. So I find that very interesting, that they want the clinical data within families and communities.

Krystal Lee  24:38

Jane, can you tell us more about that clinical side that Ilima was referencing and the connection to the promising practice.

Jane Chung  24:47

Yeah. So in 2018 we we began MALAMA. And MALAMA is an acronym, actually, and it stands for “Mini Ahupuaʻa for Lifestyle and Mea’ai ​through Aquaponics”… I always get the acronyms kind of mixed up, but yes, I believe that’s the acronym. But Malama also means to take care of in Hawaiian, so it has double, you know, multiple layers of meaning. And we named it that because we saw that what came out of this program was that people learn to care for not just the aquaponics, the plants and the fish, but also each other, right? So it’s a family based program, so from kids all the way to the elders are invited, and they participate, and they all have a role. And so it’s about malama the family and also the Malama, the community, the community building that Ted was talking about, because the families participate in a cohort. So there’s 10 families in a cohort, and they go through the six month program together. And so that was based on what Ilima was doing since 2006-2009 she was already doing this in the in the community, like Ted was talking about, and over time, like we mentioned, people kept being interested. There was a continued demand and interest over the years, and in 2018 we had an opportunity to apply for a research project, a pilot research project with NIMHD. And as Ilima and I were talking, I said, you know, aquaponics, what you doing with aquaponics in the community? You have this program that you developed, and she’s been, you know, gathering grants and implementing these this program whenever grants were available and funding was available. But I asked, you know, we talked about, can we turn this into a research project? And before that, I was a student, and there were other public health and students from other fields at  UH helping Ilima gather data over the years, like we did some focus groups and interviews, we did a little bit of surveying, and we kept seeing that there’s something happening with health, right? People were reporting to us that they love the aquaponic system, they love the Mini Ahupuaʻa concept, they felt more connected as a family, and so we had some pilot data, but we thought, hey, how about adding on a clinical would the community be okay with that. And of course, that’s sensitive, right? We had to make sure that the community was okay with that, because collecting clinical data, there’s been so many atrocities and ethical breaches in many communities, but especially native communities, and so we wanted to make sure that the community felt like that was appropriate. And so we tested that through this pilot project in 2018 and then so that time, we collected blood pressure. We did blood pressure, we collected BMI, hip to waist ratio and a behavioral survey. So we use that as a pre-post measure, and we found some promising changes with the first cohort that we tested in Waimanalo. And then through Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we were able to test the random a weightless, randomized control design where we recruited two cohorts of 10 families each, so 20 families total, and we added on, this time, a finger prick where we could measure cholesterol and hemoglobin, A1C to look at diabetes and changes in cholesterol and so, but we made sure to always talk to the community about it, to make sure that was okay. Things that we learned was, you know, a blood draw is a little bit too invasive. I was told also, oh, to really measure dietary changes, you should collect the urine. But that was like a no go with the community, right? So it’s always balancing, like, what is best practice in, you know, public health with what’s in the community and but like Ilima said, I was really surprised, pleasantly surprised, that people really like the clinicals because it was a good way to get a temperature check on your health. And we were able to say, Oh, your hemoglobin, a1c is a little high. Let’s go, you know, let’s make sure that you get connected with the doctor, or please go see your doctor to double check, to make sure you know you’re not at risk for something. And so it’s been really great. And the nurses and the doctors that come to do the work, because we’re not clinicians. We have a partnership at the medical school here at UH, and they also built a partnership or relationship with the community. So it’s the same, it’s pretty much the same doctors and nurses that come to Waimanalo, and so they’ve come multiple times now, and so there’s that familiarity. And for the doctors and nurses, they’re like, “Wow, we never get outside, right? We never get into the community. This is a chance for us to learn community engagement, to learn how to build relationships”. So it’s been really reciprocally beneficial for the university and the community.

Cody Cotton  29:58

Thank you. Got a got a real clear picture. I appreciate the work you all have done over the years and still currently doing. Still waiting to take my trip to Hawaii. I’ll let you all know. Alright, so speaking of the future, what do you think the next steps are? How do you see the lessons you’ve learned being applied in the work towards health equity for all?

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  30:20

I think Ted spoke about it, that we just have to get there, you know, just do it. And, and Jane has spoke about it as well, is to just implement. We gotta stop talking about things and just do it, you know. And, and the community, like I said earlier, is very receptive and very much, I guess they bought in they they drank the Kool Aid, and they love it, and and I think we have a wahine program that I’m doing for my PhD study, and it’s been amazing just to be able to implement things that the community wants, and have so much participation and action and influence. And really, it really does build health, the ability to I’ve learned a lot from Jane. Trust me, I know how to play the game now, and it really is a game of strategy. We call it konane, and that’s how you build one kingdom in Hawaii, is to play with strategy. And if the community wants to play, we just bring them what they want and what they need, next.

Krystal Lee  31:29

Thanks for that. Iliima Ted,

Ted Radovich  31:32

yeah. So I think one of the things that we learned is that the we can from from the inside as well restructure how institutions operate, and we can change the culture internally. I think, you know, I think I’ve never been a fan of disruption. I see its value sometimes, and sometimes it’s the only choice, but throwing rocks from the outside, while it can have some impact, I think real significant change can occur from the inside, although it’s slower and sometimes less satisfying than throwing rocks, I think our administration has learned some of these lessons that we can still do… we can still fulfill our traditional mandate and serve our traditional clientele, while at the same time by making targeted shifts in how we do business, really significantly improve the way that we serve our community. And we can do, we can do both without, you know, turning over the boat. And so I think taking those, those lessons, and expanding them and, you know, it’s, we’re fortunate to have an administration now that is is open to learning lessons. And so I think if we can continue that, with regard to how the university does business, there is a larger push now within the university, there is always a recognition, you know, at least lip service, that we are a unifying place of learning. But there have been investments to really accelerate realizing that that goal, and I think that that larger institutional change here at the University anyway, can can feed acceleration of change at our college level, and again, just really improving the way, you know, we steward a lot of land, and some of the land in Waimanalo that we do, and that that’s, that’s, that’s a very important kuleana, which is responsibility, privilege and a whole host of things, and that, I think we’re learning lessons to help us improve on fulfilling a kuleana to our broader Hawaii Community, and specifically our Kanaka here in Hawaii. So I’m optimistic about, you know about that. We still got a long way to go, but I think the lessons that we’re learning, others are are also learning, and it will affect, affect some change, hopefully.

Krystal Lee  33:52

I just want to uplift some of what I heard from you all, the idea of just doing the work right? There’s a lot. There’s always going to be a lot to talk about, but we can talk, but we can also do, at the same time. And then secondly, you highlighted Ilima, the importance of going with and strategizing along with the community. And then the idea of culture shifts being possible. And you know the idea that, like to Jane’s point earlier, that culture is part of how we stay healthy. And cultures can shift over time. Cultures inside universities and other organizations and systems can shift to prioritize health if communities are engaged and prioritized in the work. And then to Ted’s point, that you can do both, right? You don’t have to necessarily choose one or the other. So I really appreciate you all highlighting those lessons for us. One of the core beliefs of the podcast team is summed up in the words of Octavia Butler, when she says, “All that you touch you change, and all that you change changes you”. And I wonder if any of you. Are willing to tell us, like, how your IRL experience and the beloved community that we’re building with IRL, in IRL, how has that changed you, and how has that allowed you to change your communities?

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  35:14

For me, I believe that IRL demonstrates generosity, generous opportunities, but also generosity in building networks and friendships and lifelong relationships. You know, a lot of programs don’t give you that ability, and they only show you their 10 minute spiel, and it starts here and it ends here, and that’s it. And I see IRL as persistent and consistent with many opportunities, and even more so within the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s bigger realm is is like lifelong opportunity and and for me, I see the changes that we’ve been able to implement with the learnings from IRL that have definitely improved a lot of what we do in our community. So mahalo, always to IRL.

Jane Chung  36:03

So I was listening to all the episodes in season one, and what came out to me was relationships, right? And I’ve already known that or learned that, especially from the Waimanalo community, the importance of relationships, but IRL really helped us expand our relationships, like we already talked about, but also elevate the work that we do. And so now we have a five year study that we’re running. We’re in year four, and we’ve expanded to Maui and Hilo, so outside of Waimanalo, so IRL has just really been the seed for us to expand our relationships with other scholars, like minded scholars, that’s really I value that a lot, like Ilima said, just meeting people who are really inspiring and affirming. And I felt like IRL really invested in us as scholars and as people, not just the project, but believed in us, and that was so different from the other programs that I’ve been a part of, or other funding that we’ve gotten. And I was really appreciative that IRL also listened to us and were willing to evolve. And that’s very much like CBPR. Like you gotta, you gotta go with the wave. And I remember, and then I also appreciated the self care like so that’s one of my transformations, to really think about caring for ourselves and not as a selfish thing, but as an act of resistance. And I remember we came together like as COVID was, you know, getting a little better, and we had to, we weren’t able to gather as a cohort and do that, like special trip that year. Usually we we were planning to do and we were planning to do it actually in Hawaii, but instead, Ira helped us pivot, and then we gathered and we had that, like self care retreat, like that was amazing. You know, where in academia or in our careers, are you able to get that kind of care? Like i just i I’ll remember that forever and treasure that, because we all needed that after coming out of the pandemic, to gather, to care for ourselves, to care for for each other. And I remember all the IRL fellows coming together. And it was like adult summer camp. We were all just like, “Oh my God”. Like, hugging each other, sharing stories, some people crying and like, we just really needed that. And you folks were like, “Yeah, let’s go that this is an important part of the work that we do, that’s, this is an important part of health equity”. And so I really appreciate IRL letting me know that letting me kind of like push the boundaries of what our academic spaces should look like.

Cody Cotton  38:49

Wow, wow. That was that was beautifully said. Well, finally, along the same theme as we’re working towards health equity, or equity in general, and against systems of oppression. This work can take a toll on us, as you just stated, can you please share with our listeners how you engage in self care as you do this difficult work?

Ted Radovich  39:12

Alright, I’ll take, I’ll take a turn real quick here. I guess that’s a good question. I think really taking better care of my health has been, you know, making that a proactive I’m like, Ilima is like, I was 15 years since my last doctor visit a while ago. And yeah, realizing that that that’s a privilege to have the insurance that I have through work and stuff, and that I need to take advantage of it and really taking care of my health is beneficial for all aspects of my health, as well as my family and my community, right? And so it also helps that I live, we all do, and work in our, you know, the community that we love, and our community is beautiful. It’s beautiful physically. We’ve got the mountains right there, and the ocean and then just taking a break and just. Just smelling the roses, I think is, I guess it’s a little trite, but it’s easy to not do that, and it’s easy to just, but just breathing for a second, right? Stop, breathe and look around. I think that’s probably one of the most effective ways to do it. And then, you know, surrounding yourself with the community of your choice as well as the community that you’re born into. I think are approaches that I’ve taken.

Jane Chung  40:29

My form of self care is definitely the ocean. I love to surf. I love to be in the ocean. And I got to surf yesterday, and I haven’t been able to surf for a couple weeks, which is a long time for me, especially in the summer. So it was just like, oh, I needed this when I jumped in the water and saw some friends, saw some turtles, saw some dolphins, and so it’s like a mindfulness spot for me. Another thing that, in case Ilima doesn’t mention, is going to the Korean spa. She goes a lot more than I do, for sure, it’s just so funny, because I remember, you know, growing up, I spent six years of my childhood there, and hated going there because they just scrubbed you so hard, and I just didn’t like it as a kid, but she like reintroduced it to me as an adult, and now I like, love it, like I love it, and I usually go only when we’re traveling, because there’s, like, good places on the continent, and so that’s kind of what we do. That’s our tradition. When we’re traveling for, you know, to conferences or professional gatherings together, we’ll like, check out on the map. We’ll Google, like crane sponsor when nearby, and then we’ll always make sure to go and hit it up. So it’s really kind of like revived the practice that I’d hated as a child, but now I love it as an adult, and I gotta thank Ilima for that. She always reminds me, self care is important.

Ilima Ho-Lastimos  41:59

I think I should, I should demonstrate that self care wasn’t ever a part of my life growing up, because in a village setting, you last. And I had to learn self care and social work. And it gave me the ticket that I needed. That self care. You have to take care of yourself first before you could take care of anybody else. And I have used that golden ticket ever since. And I have many forms, and I think it’s important that everybody, whatever it may be, spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, to use that free ticket to self care as much as possible. And I absolutely do.

Cody Cotton  42:36

You all are amazing team. Team Waimanalo, thank you all so much for sharing your story. We deeply appreciate your thoughts, your insights and just being a part of this IRL family. Thank you.

Krystal Lee  42:48

Yes. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you for being with us today. Thank you to our listeners, we would love to hear from you, what promising practices are you using in your work to achieve health equity? Find us on the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program LinkedIn page where you can share your thoughts, leave questions for the team. And also don’t forget to subscribe to promising practices for health equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for joining us on this journey where every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Thank you. Until next time…

Mandy LeBreche  43:35

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners, for being a part of this important conversation.

A Conversation with Dawn X. Henderson (Cohort 2)

Season 2, Episode 4 | September 24, 2025

• Speakers: Dawn X Henderson, Mandy LeBreche, J. Robin Moon, Krystal Lee

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:21

Hello and welcome back to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I am your host, Krystal Lee and my co host today is J. Robin Moon, Associate Director of Research Evaluation and Dissemination for IRL. Hey, Robin!

This season, Robin, as you know, of promising practices, we are exploring the experiences, stories and lessons of our IRL fellows and alumni. And today, I am so pleased to have our cohort 2 alum,Dr. Dawn X. Henderson, with us. Welcome, Dawn!

Dawn X Henderson  01:08

 Hey! So excited to be here.

J. Robin Moon 01:11

We’re so glad to have you here with us today. Dawn, before we ask you to tell us about yourself and your work. We invite you to engage with us in one of our signature, IRL promising practices, that is checking in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building communities that collaborate effectively in the work towards health equity. So our meetings, we do a quick check in with everybody to help us continuously build connections in our beloved community. So we’re going to do the same here. And today’s check in question is, if you could be anywhere in the world, world, broadly defined right now, where would you be? I’m going to start, I have already told Krystal and some others. I’ve had some unexpected world trip cancellations to different parts of the world this summer… trips that I really look forward to. But then this, you know, being here in New York City when weather is actually rarely amazing, and I get to, like, do my daily routine, have my morning time, and it just been like, so great, to the point I don’t even want to travel anymore. So I really love being at home and ground myself. And I, right now today, I would like to be nowhere other than my home, and I’m going to toss it to Krystal.

Krystal Lee  02:43

Yeah, I also would, I think I would choose home as well. I have been developing my back garden. I started out trying to grow things that we could eat as food, but I have –  this year because of some challenges, weather and so on, and just things not going as expected. I pivoted to flowers, and I am really, really enjoying the bursts of marigolds that I have in my backyard. And I also have some tomatoes, and I have my asparagus.

J. Robin Moon 03:20

She’s got a colony. They’re still coming up…

Krystal Lee  03:24

30 of them. Now it’s so it’s beautiful. And my office over my window overlooks the garden. And I would, I’m just, it’s a sunny, beautiful, windy day outside. I would just love to be sitting outside, and that’s where I’m going when I’m done with this conversation, to just go sit outside and enjoy and do something to move me towards my my hope for next year is that I’ll have plants that welcome monarch butterflies, so like milkweed and so on, lots of bright, beautiful flowers. My next door neighbor, who grew up in this neighborhood, he said that when he was young, there would be thousands of Monarch butterflies when he was young, but, you know, because of all kinds of different changes and so on, we he just doesn’t see them anymore, and I want to try to bring them back. So that’s my goal for my garden. And I’m just going to go sit out there and enjoy that. I’ll toss it to you Dawn. Where would you like to be?

Dawn X Henderson  04:23

Okay? So I heard “world”, so I’m going to lean into all that I am and all that those before me were. And so in truth, I want to be outside of the universe. I want to be in the celestial bodies. I want to see the birth of a star. I want to watch Earth from afar. I really do. I am not practicing this. I want to see the planets. I want to see the sun. I want to see what the world looks like from a more macro place. Because I think sometimes we can get caught up in our individual worlds, and sometimes. So I would love to, like, sit back and watch and understand how we are connected to the broader, broader universe. And oftentimes, I think looking out at the night sky, you know, I do a lot of wondering, just wondering what’s out there. And so I would like to sit and be there and understand what’s out there while I’m also loving what’s out there. So that’s my place, the destination. If anybody’s building a spaceship, let me be the first passenger. I’m on it.

J. Robin Moon 05:29

She created a poem out of this checking question outside the universe.

Krystal Lee  05:36

I love it. One of my favorite things about Dawn. So Dawn, if you wouldn’t mind, just tell us and our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Dawn X Henderson  05:45

Yes. So I am the daughter of Jacqueline Louise Ward and James Willie Henderson. I’m a middle child, youngest to Badia Henderson, oldest to Darul Islam Henderson. I’m a daughter who talked to trees as a child. Believed that the sky and the clouds could talk back. I oftentimes would go hug a tree and say, “God, do you love me?” You know, sad conversations. I was I was often quiet. I’m a proud mother of twins Atesia and to T’Jai, a proud mother of a 15 year old that I call Day. You know? I’m a reflection of those who had to be enslaved, right, those who were indigenous to this land. I am a representation of those who kind of stood on the banks of Honduras, on the banks of Jamaica, on the banks of South Carolina, in Georgia. I am a representation of those who had to travel and migrate from the south to the north, to the east and the west. I find myself now back in the South, in a place called North Carolina. I’m a lover. I’m a lover of myself. I’m a lover of community. I’m a lover of black people. I’m a lover of black indigenous people. I’m a soul writer. I’ve been writing ever since I was four. You know, sometimes writing in journals, and I’ve learned to open up my journals and open it up to the world, right? I’m a community cultivator. I like to say I’ve been cultivating community for a long, long time, starting out as a middle school science teacher, and found myself drifting into the field of community psychology. So I am all in everything a representation of many women, of many black women whose bodies have had to silence themselves from the suffering they’ve had to experience, but at the same time dreaming and having big dreams for me to be here. So I am all those things, and I’m just happy to be representing all those people.

J. Robin Moon 07:52

Thank you so much, beautiful. Please tell us the story of how you came to health equity work and what health equity looks like to you?

Dawn X Henderson  08:03

Oh, okay, this is, this is one of those questions I was like, pondering for me. So I’m going to say there are many stories, and I know I cannot adequately bring in all of them, right? But I want to acknowledge that I came to an orientation towards justice and an orientation towards healing justice because of my DNA right? My DNA holds memories of black Indigenous women, women who’ve had to suffer, as I said, who have had to carry the burden of being a woman in this country. The women who have had to die too soon. The women who have had to die from heart failure. The women who have had to die from cancer. The women who have had to die from “the womb disease”, because nobody knew what it was called back then. You know, I was called into this work because of my father and my father’s father. My father had Alzheimer’s, and we had to navigate a medical system that was quite difficult. Did not believe in his inability to communicate verbally, and only sometimes the look in his eyes would tell you his pain, and yet, folks were not responsive, right? I came into this work, because I’ve had to witness violence, gun violence, drug addiction, and all of those things. And I like to say that I had a body who moved through the system we call the public education system, in the US and understanding the trauma of that. And so by moving through that work, there is no doubt that I have to, there’s no doubt what moves through my blood, right? And so because of that, it has to inspire me and compel me to address the very systems that have led to that in order to change them, you know, in order to change them. So I believe health equity really looks like all of us. All people. Thriving. I believe it’s in the possibility that we all have access to the resources, to the care, and I say a system of care that truly values our dignity and our humanity. I believe it’s a place where we all get to exist physically, in all the ways we are – psychologically, spiritually, you know what I’m saying? I believe it’s a place of promise. I believe that it is a place of possibility, as Dr Shawn Ginwright talks about. And I believe that it is possible, even though sometimes and quite often we can think that it is not.

J. Robin Moon 10:39

Thank you, drilling down a little more specifically and your, you know, to your personal work. Now, the title of your IRL project, when you were a fellow, was “ A model for violence prevention and health promotion”. Can you tell us a little bit about the project itself, and then the about the community where your research work was based in.

Dawn X Henderson  11:02

Yeah, so I am Cohort Two. We were [Team] Guilford County, North Carolina, which is probably considered the Piedmont area of North Carolina. And so our particular work was looking at a model that we called Structured Dialog. It’s actually something that was primarily facilitated by Dr Brian Sims and we wanted to look at the ways that structured dialog actually shifts and changed the relationships that happen between home and school. You know, our theory of change was if we are changing how teachers and parents, right, how families and educators talk to each other, communicate with each other, create a shared vision for what an ideal school was, that they’re changing their relationship right? So teachers change the relationship with parents. When teachers change the relationship with parents, they change the relationship with themselves. They change the relationship with young people. And so we believe that by modeling, by using adults to model different ways to engage and relate to each other, that ultimately we’re changing how young people relate, right? Because adults are often the models in the classroom and the models in the home. So yeah, that was our project. And you know, it was quite enlightening. We were right at the cusp of covid, so we had gone into our second year when covid hit right? Like a lot of people, but I think the most beautiful thing that I want to reflect on was in the beginning of the project, before we even started to introduce them to structured dialog, was we were able to engage black families in telling us a dream. What’s your dream? Tell us the dream. What do you dream of for your children? What are the school you dream about? Right? What is, what is an ideal school that you can dream and I think that’s the most powerful piece, right? By sitting with people who have been the most marginalized in the world, to dream together, and to not only dream together, but when we use those dreams to bring school administrators and teachers in that and to hear that and say, Okay, and how do we get there? And how do we get there, we use the structured dialog, model, right, to change our relationships for us to get there.

J. Robin Moon 13:17

So you worked with the school systems, and what’s the age group of young people when you say that?

Dawn X Henderson  13:24

Yes, yes, yes. So we actually worked, not with a public school system. We worked with the charter school, charter school, and these were young people. The children were between kindergarten and I believe at the time, school went up to fifth grade.

J. Robin Moon 13:39

and you sat with the students and the families for the structured dialog?

Dawn X Henderson  13:44

Yeah, it was a family affair often. So, you know, a lot of times, you know, meeting in the evening, feeding the parents. We would have childcare for the parents, but sometimes the children were there and we were engaged in a practice of using dialog right, generating dialog around ideal visions for a school, generating dialog around what does it mean to, quote, unquote, “reduce suspension” here right, to minimize the prevalence of violence. But how do we do that by working on the relationships that were happening between the adults.

J. Robin Moon 14:20

Thank you.

Krystal Lee  14:23

What do you see, Dawn, as the promising practices that were involved in your work and maybe emerged from the work or or were actually a part of the work that you were doing in this project?

Dawn X Henderson  14:39

Yes. So I this is, I think this is a really great question. And at first I was like, Oh, it was the relationships. But I think I alluded to this before. I believe the most promising practice is actually something that catapulted my own, my own career, actually, from 2019 was facilitating space. And curating space for black families to dream and to dream of ideal conditions for their children to thrive in schools. And the second part of that practice that emerged was our ability to kind of leverage, you know, the weight that we had – the RWJF project with school administrators and teachers, right? So again, we articulated the dream, and we brought it to them and said, Okay, how do we get there, right? And to see school administrators and teachers get on board with that dream. And so for me, this is like folks who do human centered design, they talk about designing from the edges, right? When you design something from the edges and when? And we always think about those who are the most marginalized, you know what I mean? And I think about particularly youth violence and in schools, we know that those are black bodied folks, right? We know quite often those are black parents. You know, black caregivers who are excluded oftentimes or find themselves engaging in hostile school environments. So when you ask them to step outside the margins and become centered in that, right, the edge is shifted. And I think that was the most powerful piece of the work, because we saw that when they are creating the vision, and they say, “We want to invite you into our vision”, it began to shift the relationship that was happening between the school administrators, the educators and the parents,

J. Robin Moon 16:37

So facilitating the folks to move from the margins to the center… That’s the promising practice. Beautiful. 

Dawn X Henderson  16:46

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Krystal Lee  16:52

That is truly a beautiful description of a different way of being. You are trying to do work to help people live better lives. And it seems to me like it should be obvious that you engage folks in, you know, things that are intended to impact them positively, but sometimes it’s many times it doesn’t end up being that way.

J. Robin Moon 17:28

Because, because they might not have seen it before. Yeah, yeah, that’s the reimagining part, and that’s the beginning of the transformation.

Dawn X Henderson  17:36

Yes, yes.

Krystal Lee  17:39

Thank you for sharing that Dawn. It really is a it really is a shift for for me, in terms of seeing how, how this work can be done. But you mentioned, you talked about, like sharing the vision, sharing the dream with the IRL program, and having the space to do some of this work. Can you tell us a little about your – How would you describe your experience with IRL?

Dawn X Henderson  18:09

Yes, so I think my experience with IRL was kind of like empowering on one side and stagnant on the other. So I think that being a part of the IRL experience, and being called into the IRL experience, I think that they asked the teams to come up with bold ideas. Right? Bold ideas? So structured dialog, method, that’s a bold idea!

J. Robin Moon 18:41

Yeah, I would say so…

Dawn X Henderson  18:43

To try to address youth violence, and to do it by not targeting young people, right? So I want to, like note that right. To say that we understand that there’s relationships, right, that have to shift if we’re talking about addressing this symptom or whatever. I think that it was stagnant at the time, because I think we did what we what I was supposed to do, right? Come in, learn about big policy, small policy. And I’m saying

J. Robin Moon 19:16

you’re allowed, you’re allowed…

Dawn X Henderson  19:18

come in and talk about dissemination, right? Like, you know, the beautiful thing about “Yes, you guys should create a dissemination plan” and we got to write a blog, and we created an issue brief. And I would say all the things that kept me stuck and still. The things that were empowering that I think probably, I’m not sure the story can be captured in a very kind of methodological way, in terms of how we’re thinking about it – was the relationships that was offered to me, and so one relationship was, our team were granted coaches, mentors, and one of my mentors was a white, Jewish man during that time. And I’m gonna get emotional, and I’m okay with that, because there were times he would say, you know, let’s, let’s get on a call. And he would like, why are you so quiet? I’m noticing the man is dominating the conversation. I’m noticing there are things that is being said, and I know that that’s your practice, that’s you’re a community psychologist, he would say. And after that, after IRL, he stayed in my life. He chose to stay in my life as a mentor. I am not paying him. He has been a champion of mine. Two years ago, I received an award through my division in APA, which was a you know award for a lifetime contribution to community – American Psychological Association. And I received, you know, the prestigious contributions to community psych award, right? And that was really his advocacy, his nomination. I will have a piece in The American Journal of Community Psychology coming out that is a first person narrative around my own healing and love that I had to find in research. So he has been an advocate, a champion, right? And I just want to say that IRL was the vehicle for that, and that’s something you can’t necessarily quantify or qualify. Another important relationship was Miss Regina Jackson, who was in Cohort Two, and we reconnected right when I had transitioned from Duke University and I started a nonprofit. I was in a leadership position in a nonprofit, locally rooted community organization, and she was my executive coach. And if anybody knows anything about Regina Jackson, she is straight to the point, straight shooter. She’s a black woman who doesn’t play, and she would have to give it to me real at times. You know, we met monthly, and she was actually here with me when my father passed last year and stepped out of coaching role and stepped in as black woman, sister.

Dawn X Henderson  22:31

That’s what I’m saying. You can’t qualify or quantify these things. Think that there were experiences, and I wanted something that was a really beautiful experience was, I think it was going into our second year, and it was a team may have been cohort three from Team Hawaii. And they decided to bring in, I think it was different herbs and oils and what they would consider to be more indigenous Hawaiian practices into a facilitated session. They had us smelling, and we were singing and we were moving. And I said, this is research, right? This is this is what it has to be, and needs to look like. And I think all of those things were so impactful, right, so transformative to me. And so I think, you know, we’re guided into spaces for a reason, and those are the things that I think continue to inspire me. Because one, I want to pay it forward how Dr Tom Wolfe, that’s his name, has paid it forward to me. So I’m committed to mentoring and doing pro bono coaching to black women who are early career folks. You know what I mean? Because I believe that that’s what was given to me. I’m about disrupting how research looks in the world. And I believe in kind of this concept of a healing, centered lens of research. And so again, and I lean into the edges. I lean into the edges. I move back. I engage in the principle of moving back. And listening to folks who may not have a PhD, a master’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, even I would say associate’s degree, I have found that it’s often young people and those folks who are breathing, living, eating, digesting the air, and that’s where I learned from the most.

J. Robin Moon 24:23

That’s right. I think you’re speaking giving examples of ways to defy what the current structure in society defines as leadership, leadership development, and what is evidence based. I will repeat the name Tom Wolfe, Regina Jackson, another fellow, fellow from core two and Team Hawaii from cohort three is actually going to be speaking to us in the later episodes. Yes,

Dawn X Henderson  24:55

so please tell them whether they remember me at their session.

J. Robin Moon 25:02

okay, well, you already alluded to what your future started to look like because the Cohort Two was graduated. 2020 is that right? Okay, so you’ve had five years.

Dawn X Henderson  25:14

2020 What’s it? I thought it was 2021

J. Robin Moon 25:18

Is that 2021 I think 2020 was it? 2020 okay. 2020, 2017, and 2020 Yeah. Okay. So we’ve had five years of what, what the post IRL feature has been. So let me ask you this, what had been your next steps? I think you already alluded that you are a recovering academic now, yes, how do you how do you see the lessons you’ve learned from IRL, you know, being applied in the work towards health equity for all since your graduation of 2020?

Dawn X Henderson  25:53

Oh, yes. So I just want to say, I do keep my pinky toe in the academic realm, just because I’m trying to change how teaching happens, actually, on another level. So, you know, I still try to do adjunct [teaching] if I can, to shift, to shift what that looks like in higher education as much as I can. You know, given our climate. So much, I really want to reflect on what I alluded to, right, like believing in the edges, right? As somebody say, “believe in black women first, Believe, believe in black families, believe in black indigenous people”, right? Like, don’t question or interrogate, no. And so I think because of that, you know, I transitioned into the nonprofit realm. And I like to say that I really came into an organization that was trying to engage in more liberatory practices. And, you know, I was a part of that, right? It was a whole new functional area, quote, unquote, division that was being created that we call community driven research, you know what I mean? And I created a whole strategy on doing that by sitting alongside and walking alongside black parents. And specifically, these were black moms, you know what I mean, so you can think about all the lives that they’re holding, or whatever. And I think that I helped that nonprofit get over $4 million dollars, you know what I mean, through our strategy around doing community driven research, right? But I want to say that was in that work that I realized my spirit, my soul, was being kind of torn. You know what I mean? It was kind of being disrupted, feeling like it was at a place of demarcation, you know what I mean? Split in the middle, and I had to, like, you know, again, I lost my father last year, and I had to return to a conversation I had with myself a long time ago. What is my destiny? What am I supposed to be doing? And so I left, right, and I started, We Claim Research. And so We Claim Research is all about, Robin, everything that I alluded to before Krystal. It is about disrupting how we think research can happen. You know what I mean? I’m actually about to post a blog on Sunday about what does it really mean to listen and witness someone? Yyou know what I mean, we don’t talk about that when we’re designing protocols and focus groups, but it’s like, how do we really listen someone’s existence into being? Right? What does it mean to bear witness to someone’s story? You know? I mean, we’re when we’re listening, when we’re gathering stories versus data. I mean, let’s make them very human. And what is our responsibility? I feel like that’s another thing we don’t talk a lot about. It’s like, what is our responsibility outside of IRB, when we’re collecting these stories, where do these stories exist, and how are they accessible to the community who said, “I’m gonna give you consent”, right?

J. Robin Moon 29:01

Data sovereignty…

Dawn X Henderson  29:04

Yes, yes. What does it mean for us to actually sit down and say, How should I translate this? Maybe I don’t need to write a freaking peer review fear article. What does it mean if it is a piece of art, if it’s dance, if it’s theater, if it’s something else, if it’s bringing the concept of seeds in the braids back, you know what I mean. And what does that mean in order for that community to use that, to leverage that knowledge, in order to maintain their ability to continue to heal, their ability to continue to love, their ability to continue to dream. And I will say also, you know, short plug, it’s coming out soon, it landed me in a place where I am publishing my book, a guide, right? And the book is called “We get to Love, Heal and Dream”. It’s about building community with ourselves and others. You know, as a community psychologist, my training has often been outside. You know, think of community outside, and I like to say we have to work on community inside, too, because what we do to this is what we do to that, right? So, how are we shifting that out? And so beginning to again, acknowledge the ways that I’ve sat down with everyday community members as co authors of their stories, as translators of that, and that’s the kind of work I want to continue to do, because I do believe in, again, the existence of parallel worlds. And while we know that this is a the conditions that we’re in right now can be quite daunting. They can make us believe that we are powerless. We can feel helpless, right? And we can feel hopeless. I believe there’s the other world right, there’s the powerful, right? There’s the hopeful, right? There’s, I know we can, you know, all of those things. And so that’s the kind of work I want to continue to lean into. And what I feel really again when I’m reflecting on my journey in IRL. The last thing I do want to shout out, and this is John Schwabish from the Urban Institute. I don’t think, I don’t think I also want to, I have to acknowledge John and the beauty that he shifted. So I do want to acknowledge that he was really helping us to think through data in a different way, in a more visual way. But then I think me, when I think about my DNA, was like, oh, but how can we even think of it beyond graphs and bars? Again, what does it look like to become a piece of theater? You know what I mean, just different kinds of work. Yeah, yes. And so I do want to acknowledge, you know, I think again, that was a beautiful connection and a beautiful experience that kind of sparked, put a little spark within my own mind to even challenge myself even further.

J. Robin Moon 32:03

You’ve been busy since in the last five years, so you reclaim research, and congratulations on your publication. And all the information, including Jonathan Schwabish at Urban Institute will share with our listeners in the show notes. Thank you,

Krystal Lee  32:21

Thanks dawn for that. That struck me as such a beautiful reflection on your experience, and I think you have raised some questions that others who are engaging in community, engaged research and wanting to do more of this, can think through in order to do right by the communities and do right by the work and by the people and even by themselves as individuals. And so I’m grateful for the reflection that you’ve shared that will hopefully get us to this world, this new world of possibilities, and, you know, happiness and hopefulness that is so antithetical to some of what we’re dealing with at this time. So, thank you for sharing that. I want to, you know, share about one of our core beliefs in this podcast team, which is it’s summed up in the words of Octavia Butler, who shared that you know “all that you touch, you change, and all that you change changes you”. Will you please tell us how IRL, our Beloved Community has changed you, and how do you think that You have changed either the program or your community?

Dawn X Henderson  33:44

Yes, so I think the community, as I reflected on the experiences, the relationships that were developed, I don’t necessarily think that it changed me. I believe that it was an invitation back to a version of me that existed, that existed before I was indoctrinated inside of a historically white institution and indoctrinated in public education, and it was probably Dawn at the age of about four or five, right? The Dawn who was highly creative. My mom thought I was going to be an architect at the age of four, by some drawing to some multistory building. She sung a lot. She danced freely. She was fearless. She was okay, like I said, talking to grass, talking to the trees, and knowing that the Earth talks back to her, she knew that. She ran through the water uninhibited. She was not afraid to step outside, to be different, to be weird, to not necessarily always have people who liked her. And I think that the relationships that I developed helped me reconnect with her. The degree to which I changed IRL, I think you may have to do a follow up interview, you know, ask people that one. But I do believe in my existence, and my existence as a black bodied, being in the world, as a woman body, being in the world wherever I stand, it’s a radical act of resistance, right? Because we know that there have been systems designed to annihilate us, to murder us early. And when I’m able to stand anywhere. I am transforming. I’m transforming that space. And so I wholeheartedly believe, just in my existence, I’m doing that.

J. Robin Moon 36:11

I so hear you. You know, my birthday is coming up, so I have been in, you know, I set a daily intention, and starting today, until the birthday for whole week, it’s going to be I will celebrate my life today. And I am hearing you and feeling you through all my body right now. Yes, yes.

Dawn X Henderson  36:33

I don’t use birthdays anymore. I tell people Earth Strongs. You know, the birthday is the day we were born. But every year is our Earth strong? Celebrate, celebrate it as as the 365.25 as much as you can.

J. Robin Moon 36:47

 Yes, celebrating our bodies, our lives, our existence, is the act of radical. Radical act, yeah,

Dawn X Henderson  36:58

yeah, of resistance in love.

J. Robin Moon 37:02

Okay. Finally, we’ve come to the final question for you, Dawn working towards equity and against systems of oppression that we’ve talked about so far can take its toll every day. So we ask this question to all our guests, can you share with our listeners how you engage in self care as you do this difficult work?

Dawn X Henderson  37:25

Yes, so I literally just got a phone call from my primary care physician who was like, “Oh yeah, you’re gonna have to increase your exercise to about 50 minutes, 3 times a week. I was like, “I’m getting older!”  But anyway. I will say again. Over the past year, I have been dedicated to ancestral veneration. I have created my own altar that acknowledges those who have passed before me. Every morning I rise, I say my prayer, I give my meditations in the AM, you know what I mean, and I think that that has helped me to kind of reroute myself. I do belly dancing on Sundays. I literally was dancing this morning when I have no reason to. I love engaging in small ways to play. Actually, I organized what I call play activities here, like every quarter. So I did a Black mamas kickball, Black mamas skate. We did Black Mama’s nap. We’re gonna do black we did Black mamas camp out. We’re gonna do black mamas make Kung Fu flicks. You can ask me about that later. We all grew up in like, you know, the 80s, when we were watching Sunday morning kung fu flicks, and we were like, We should do that. We should make a movie of us just being silly and doing that. So we are that’s just something, you know, again, inviting play back into my life, or whatever. I read romance novels. I struggle through non fiction, but I’ve committed myself to read some good non fiction from the beginning to the end, and not just, you know, certain chapters or whatever. I’ve been cooking more, eating out less and just practicing loving on me, loving on we. Beautiful dream right here.

J. Robin Moon 39:29

Dr. Dawn X. Henderson, thank you so much for sharing your stories with us today. Your playful energy and spirit are infectious, and we really deeply appreciate your insights.

Dawn X Henderson  39:42

 Thank you so much and so happy and precious, precious energy all around us. Y’all be blessed.

Krystal Lee  39:51

Thank you so much. Dawn. Thank you, and thank you to our listeners. We would love to hear from you. What promising practices are you using in your work to achieve health equity? Find us on the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders LinkedIn page, where you can share your thoughts and leave questions for the team, and don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Thank you for joining us on this journey where every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time…

Mandy LeBreche  40:35

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners, for being a part of this important conversation.

A Conversation with Team Boston (Cohort 7)

Season 2, Episode 3 | September 12, 2025

• Hosted by:  J. Robin Moon and Mandy LaBreche
• Guests: Davine Holness and Shoba Ramanadhan

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

Ian, this is the promising practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

J. Robin Moon 00:21

Hello and welcome back to promising practices for health equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I am your host. J. Robin Moon, sitting in for Krystal Lee and my co host today is Mandy LaBreche, Associate Director of Operations for IRL. Hey Mandy!

Mandy  00:42

Hey Robin!

J. Robin Moon 00:45

In this season, we are featuring the experiences, stories and lessons of our IRL fellows and alumni. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with our IRL cohort seven, the last cohort from Boston, Massachusetts. We’re happy to welcome Shoba Ramanadhan and Davine Holness to the podcast. Welcome friends!

Shoba an Davine  01:08

Thank you, Robin and Mandy, happy to be here.

Mandy LeBreche  01:11

Yeah, we’re so happy to have both of you with us today. And before we ask you to tell us a little bit about yourself and your work, we invite you to get engaged with us in one of our signature IRL promising practices, which is checking in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building communities that collaborate effectively in our work towards health equity. So at the beginning of all of our meetings, we do a quick check in to help us continuously build connections in our beloved community. So our check-in question for today is, if you could have any other job, what would it be?

And I can kick us off while all of you think about it. I always say that if I wasn’t working in public health, that my dream job would be to be a phys ed teacher. And all my friends and family kind of laugh, because they’re like, for a dream job that is very attainable, but I just feel like I didn’t go down that track in college. And I actually did look into it, like going back, like, if there’s some kind of, like, accelerated master’s degree, I could get to teach Phy Ed and it was really like, I couldn’t find anything. Like, they used to have certain programs for people without an education background, but they don’t have those programs anymore. I did look into it during the heart of the pandemic. So, yeah, I think I would be, I think I would want to be a Phy Ed teacher. I just love kids and young people. I love movement. I’m super into sports and activities that get your body moving, whether it’s like, just recreationally or super competitively. So I think, I think I would like that if I wasn’t doing this

Davine  03:03

Physical education. Is that what “Phy Ed” is short for?

Mandy LeBreche  03:09

Yeah, yeah, physical education or gym teacher. I’ll toss it to you, Robin,

J. Robin Moon 03:17

Thanks, Mandy, you would have been a great teacher. I already know it. It’s not too late.I’m an immigrant who started high school in this country, and I went to undergraduate where it was very much like a classical studies kind of school. So I didn’t know that architecture could be a major. If I were to do it all over again, I would have been… I think I definitely would have studied architecture and urban planning, like, like a civil engineering maybe one or the other to, like, build and rebuild cities like [from the] ground up. There’s so many places that need it right now, and there are also many rural, small, smaller villages, like anywhere, including in the mountains and, you know, the seaside. I would love to building that. I think that might be a little too late to become that, but I can. There are things I can do to be part of that. But yeah, that’s what I think about. I’ll toss it to Davine.

Davine  04:13

Okay, if I could have any other job, I would be a star on Broadway. If I need to ground it in reality, then I would teach like children’s theater. But if we’re not facing this in reality, I would be a star on Broadway. I would be playing Joanne in “Rent”, which would still be lovely.

Mandy LeBreche  04:32

I love that. I’m obsessed with seasons of love, and I’m singing it all the time up in here.

Shoba  04:40

So I have been saying this for years, that if I had another job, I would have an aromatherapy shop on a beach, and I think now I’m going to add crafts to it. So aroma therapy and, you know, space for people to come and be creative and on a beach, that’s me.

J. Robin Moon 05:01

Friends. I think these are all very attainable in a lot of ways. Now we’re gonna actually get into the conversation. Please tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves. Let’s start with you. Devine,

Davine  05:17

We decided to bring you poems to introduce ourselves. So yes, I brought a poem to introduce you to me. I am from a long line of women who take in all the village children and talk to their plants, who learn from nature and from every bad situation. From dozens of cousins, most of whom are actually related to me. I am from salt and water, ocean sweat, tears and chicken foot soup, from people who were strong because there was no other choice. I am from proud Jamaicans who know how to work hard and know how to have a good time. From collectors, mediators and storytellers. Pillars of the community who have practiced social work since before colonizers coined the term. I’m from self taught musicians teaching others how to be self taught, singing their ancestors songs in a strange land. I’m from all three corners of a triangular trade route that marred history and the Atlantic with blood. I’m from a pizza shop on Fourth Avenue where my mom taught me phonics by writing on the napkins from extra homework assigned either at my parents whim or because we asked a question about our regular homework. From libraries, drama club and a karaoke machine. I am from a vibrant community of immigrants and their children. From an early start to activism, organizing against our own separate and unequal education. I am from a bittersweet syncretism that kept us safe. I’m from lineages of pain, persistence and promise. I am from rest as a privilege we cannot afford, and an ongoing struggle to reclaim rest as a birthright. I am from “pay it forward” and “pass it on”. That’s me.

J. Robin Moon 07:03

Wow, wow, wow. Thank you.

J. Robin Moon 07:08

We want that to put on the show notes, I think Davine.

Shoba  07:14

I learned about you in that. 

Davine  07:15

It was bespoke. It was created just for this moment. 

Mandy 07:19

Wow!

J. Robin Moon 07:20

no, but you have the honor to follow that.

Shoba  07:26

Oh, yeah, good luck. So yeah, I did. And I am from poem as well. I am from Indian parents banging around as loud as possible early on weekends when I was a teenager. I am from Saris of mustard and maroon, turquoise and purple. Sounds of the soccer field deep in the heart of Texas. I am from russem as a source of comfort and chilly crab on East Coast Parkway. I am from I love yous and being called Kanem, I am from the chaos family, a grandfather who served in the British Indian Army and then the Indian Army, a grandmother who led by example, civil servants, teachers and a proud college graduate given a parade on an elephant because he was the first in his village. I am from a plane ride to the US with $7 in a pocket.That’s me.

J. Robin Moon 08:20

Wow. Thank you for taking this inspiring introduction to the next level. Thank you so much. Yeah,

Mandy LeBreche  08:28

Those are beautiful. What a great idea as a way to introduce yourself.

Shoba  08:32

Wow. We did it at a workshop recently, and we set a record of making people cry in a workshop as quickly as anyone had before, because people really opened up and sort of set the stage for really engaging all day.

Mandy LeBreche  08:47

Yeah, that was beautiful. Thank you to you both. Okay, so I got the next question, and it’s, please tell us a story of how you came to your health equity work and what health equity looks like to you. Shoba, do you want to start?

Shoba  09:04

Sure. I think about being a graduate student and working at a YMCA as a program evaluator, and just being struck by how different the programs looked in practice versus what was on paper and what was on you know, reports. I was also really impressed by the commitment that staff had to the predominantly black and brown youth that they served. At the same time. I was watching how their expertise, their dedication, their commitment, weren’t really lifted up, and if anything, they were faulted when, you know, programs didn’t get run a certain way, but it was really because they had not been trained or supported or encouraged. So to me, the health equity work that I do feels really focused on this idea of rich knowledge, expertise and commitment that staff have in community based organizations, particularly since so many CBO staff come from the communities they serve, there’s this deep connection and commitment. And so the health equity work that I’ve been doing really focuses on what assets sit in community spaces, whose careers or contributions are often undervalued, and how do we recenter their expertise, things like that. And so I’ve been doing variations of this work for about 20 years in varied forms, both in the US and also in India, but it always, for me, comes back to the power of people who are doing the work.

J. Robin Moon 10:26

Thank you for sharing that.

Davine  10:28

I’m still thinking about Shoba’s answer and like I didn’t know until we were preparing for this that Shoba started out in the YMCA, but it shows like it makes sense, that your value of the people doing the work came from there. For me, I came to this work through my work as a social worker, which was just kind of like in me, for as long as I can remember, like I was mediating between my sister and my cousin when I was really little, and like, asking fellow children questions, and then they would be, like, “as me more questions!” And I am also an eldest daughter of immigrants. So yeah, I became a therapist. The degree was mostly a formality by that point, and I started… I graduated from social work school in 2017 in a political moment when I was just feeling a lot of anger, and I felt determined to have my work that I was doing day to day be pushing for justice. I was seeking a way to like, support the communities that I was a part of and the communities that supported me. So my dream job, which is the job that brought me to this project, was working at Boston GLASS, which is a community center for LGBTQ plus youth of color, and I did not expect that I would become a researcher as part of that process, but it seemed like a really great opportunity to uplift the work that was being done at Boston GLASS and then broader other communities and other organizations like Boston GLASS.

J. Robin Moon 11:55

Thank you so much, both for sharing that. Now about your IRL project. The title of your project is “Identifying practice based strategies to promote mental health among LGBTQ plus youth of color in the context of structural racism and anti LGBTQ plus stigma”. Davine, please tell us about the project and about the community where your research is based.

Shoba  12:21

Yes, I’ll start with the community, because Boston GLASS is such a special community, and it is a physical manifestation of the broader LGBTQ+ people of color community. When you walk into Boston GLASS, everyone feels at home, and for some of our youth, it’s the only place that feels like home. It’s a community center that serves youth, ages 13 to 29 depending on the program. It might stop at 25 and it offers a wide range of services. The heart and soul is the drop in center, where you might just see young people hanging out, taking a nap, having some food, watching Drag Race or some musical or some reality TV show. The Queer Ultimatum was a big one, and it’s really connected to the ballroom community. So different houses will come together to compete. They, during the week, will practice, their vogueing, and then at certain events, we’ll have balls where people will be competing. And that’s it’s sort of like the beating heart of Boston GLASS, it is a really powerful way to get young people in the door and connected to resources and health supports that they need.

So our project is focusing on specifically how organizations like GLASS are tailoring the evidence based interventions that they’re given to actually meet the needs of the population they serve. We know that the vast majority of the evidence based interventions that we’re taught were created with and for CIS het, white people with money and power, which doesn’t reflect the population that we’re serving. And so there’s a lot of creative tailoring that has to happen so that we’re actually meeting young people’s needs. So we wanted to study how that works at GLASS, how it works at other orgs like GLASS, with the ultimate goal of broadening what counts as an evidence based intervention. Ballroom, for example, I get to see firsthand how that makes a huge difference in young people’s mental health, and that’s really hard to fund. Same thing with housing services and getting young people fed. It makes so much of a difference. If young people have their basic needs met, then they can meet their mental health needs. But that’s really hard to find. So we want to, we want to create an evidence base for that kind of work, study what’s working and broaden those strategies.

Mandy LeBreche  14:47

How long has Boston GLASS been around?

Speaker 4  14:50

It started in 1995 so we’re coming up on our 30 year anniversary. It really has been a pillar of like the low. Local Boston queer community.

Mandy LeBreche  15:02

Okay. Next question is, ooh, this one’s kind of open ended and kind of broad. So I’m curious how you two will interpret. How would you describe your experience with IRL?

Shoba  15:11

So I was first introduced to IRL when I was invited to lead a couple of workshops. So I got to come in and hear about all these amazing projects, see these wonderful groups of community and university based researchers, and just, I don’t know, enjoy the spirit of IRL. And so I then, after doing it a couple times, I kept telling the people running it like, I really need to do this. This is going to be life changing. And every year the call would come out and it wouldn’t be a fit, because I don’t do work in environmental justice, I don’t do work in fatherhood, whatever it is. Finally a call came out that did fit. And so, yeah, I think I was already sold well before I walked in on the first official day. And I think of IRL as really being life changing, career changing, and personally, life changing. I haven’t been in a space that is so centered on impact, so centered on community. Yeah, in this way, I think there’s just something about the emphasis on community, and that can be defined in so many different ways, right? And that’s the beauty of it. But centering the range of communities that we all are existing in, contributing to, avoiding harm of. So IRL has just been, yeah, just sort of a magical space. I think, to me, one of the best ways to describe it, a couple of us a few years ago, said, you can walk into the IRL meeting, and it’s almost like you’ve put down a backpack of some sort of bricks or weights or something, like everyone is just able to breathe easier. And I think that’s probably particularly true for folks who have multiply marginalized identities in the spaces they operate in, but that ability to just kind of put that down and be with other people, and not that it always goes smoothly. I think that’s the other thing, right? It’s not that everyone’s being so polite that it always goes smoothly, but there is space for people to learn and to do better and be better. So there’s a safety in that that I think also allows people to grow more than if you have to be so careful and, you know, sort of walking on eggshells. And then lastly, I would just say nobody has swag like IRL. I think I even have one of my mugs here today.

J. Robin Moon 17:29

I think it’s Mandy. Thank you, Mandy, you’ve done right by us. Sophisticated designs.

Mandy LeBreche  17:35

I don’t know, do you have the t-shirt though? Shoba, the limited run t-shirt with a typo in the name of the program. Remember that?

Shoba  17:44

I remember that, no, I don’t have that one. But I will say to me, it’s not just like, oh, you gave us a fancy water bottle, like, to me, that has such a warm sentiment attached to it, but it’s also the care, right? Like, it’s that kind of thing, like creating an environment of care that I’ve certainly started to take into a lot of different spaces in my work, even the work that Davine, well, we’ll get into it, but that work that we had planned for a future grant, like, really centered on, how do we build a space that’s like IRL.,

Davine  18:13

My experience, I was surprised at how much fun it is. I remember, like, every time we convene in person, it really feels like a retreat. And I always remember the first time we convened, we had like, this, this salon afterwards, and then we went out to eat afterwards, and we were, like, all drinking a lot and having a lot of fun. And I was like, wow, academics really like to party. I did not know that. And Shoba had to educate me that this is not actually typical for how academics hang out, but I have a lot of fun. I build really meaningful connections. We build traditions with each other, like we always go do karaoke whenever we link up, and we don’t get to see each other in person often, but it was a lot of fun, a lot of meaningful community, and a lot of shifts in my career trajectory and in how I think of myself as a leader.

J. Robin Moon 19:09

Wow ,I love these words we’re hearing. Thank you so much. I as a program staff, I remember reviewing your application and this so you applied under structural racism as the project. But your project really stood out to me, among few others, as an intersect, the one that deals with intersectionality, which cannot be easy, and we in the in our circle, if you all might know what that means, intersectionality, but I think that that is also still an underappreciated area of not just research, community work as well. So we’re very curious to know, tell us about the promising practice, or multiple practices that in your work of intersectionality that have emerged from your IRL project.

Davine  19:59

For me, I think about engaging with the community on the community’s terms. When I think about our project through the lens of intersectionality, structural racism in general has caused a lot of harm to communities, often through academia. And then when you add on the LGBTQ+ community, that’s another community that has been systematically either neglected or harmed by academia, and so we wanted to be very thoughtful about engaging with the community and not taking an extractive approach and not causing harm, and really respecting any apprehension that might come. So that meant that we engaged with the community in the way that we like to engage with ourselves as a queer community. I would go to ballroom events. We met the staff at Boston GLASS as a research team for the first time at one of our annual family dinner events that Boston GLASS always hosts around the holidays to make youth feel at home. And then we started asking, what do people want us to study, and what do they want the outcomes to be? So we asked staff members and some peer leaders who are young people who are also staff members, what should we research? What problems do you want this research to solve? What outcomes do you want to see? How should we ask you these questions, like, what do you want to do? Interviews? Do you want to use your creativity? What would be really helpful? So when I think of a promising practice from this, I think about like, really putting the community first, being accountable to the community in terms of what they want to see, and that has really shaped every aspect of our project, and that is part of how we know our project is actually going to be helpful to the community, because it’s what they ask for.

J. Robin Moon 21:50

Thank you. Shoba, do you have anything to add to that?

Shoba  21:57

Yeah, I think you know when Davine, when you were talking, it made me think of one of the most important in my mind, promising practices from this work has been you having a role as an equal co researcher, but also being a staff member at GLASS when we started, and being a member of the community that you know of which youth are served. And I think, you know, I’ve been doing community engaged research for 18 years. And I have to say, one of my biggest worries is always, are we overstepping? Are we doing something inadvertently that will cause harm, something like that? And I just feel like there’s a built in protection if you have somebody who just knows that world and is of the world, and I think especially for us, since you’re that trusted practice person, it just allowed us to be more confident in what we were doing, because we had not that you can speak for everybody, but you can at least like start to vet and then also people would feel open to say, “Hey, Davine, we’re not good with this”. And I think that, to me, really was different, because in most projects that I’ve been part of, you know, the academic team has more resources. They typically have more decision making power all these different things, whereas this was set up as we are all equal partners in this. And if it’s a no go for anybody, it’s a no go. And maybe that’s also one of the promising practices I know you and I had talked about Davine, is this idea is taking time to just be like, who are you? How do you work? How do you communicate? And not that it went smoothly all the time by any means. But again, at least, like, sort of taking that time and also just starting the conversation. So when, if we did need to have a difficult conversation, we’d already started that path, and so it was easier to come to it. So I think, yeah, those are the things that really stuck out to me. Is just the structure of the program. Because we always say we want to, like, put practice first in community. This is a way to operationalize it. Just set it up so everybody gets the same number of dollars, same number, same amount of decision making power all of it. That feels like a really clean way to do it. And also, if somebody doesn’t want to be part of that, that’s okay too, but it’s going to lead to a very different kind of project. And so I think this was the structure of it worked very well for us.

Mandy LeBreche  24:24

I love that. I love hearing all of that. It’s like, you know, all this stuff was pretty set up intentionally, but it’s not always that we hear about how it comes into play within the team. So I love hearing all of this.

J. Robin Moon 24:40

I hear the integrity in, you know, the organization’s work. You’re walking the talk and honoring that. It’s gonna move only at the Speed of Trust, right? Just really, actually doing it is, like, the hardest part, and it’s not easy to find.

Shoba  24:57

Yeah, that’s, I think, one of the hardest things is this idea of going slow, and I think it comes up at every one of our IRL meetings, is that, that reminder of just go slower. So I’ve been trying to think of it as like, do less, be more and not be more, in the sense of be shinier and more effective and more efficient, but just like be with the people, with your partners, whoever. And I think that’s that’s a really hard thing to do in a lot of the environments, professional and community that we work at, or academic and community that we work in, but that that feels like something that’s so hard to learn, and I’m relearning, attempting to be better about it every day, but it’s a tough one.

Mandy LeBreche  25:41

Yeah, I think that’s a promising practice in and of itself. Yeah, wow. This is great. Alright, the next question pivots a little towards looking towards the future. So for both of you, what do you think are some of your next steps, and how do you see the lessons you’ve learned being applied in the work towards health equity for all as you move forward?

Davine  26:06

In terms of next steps, we literally just yesterday, submitted a different grant application. We want to further the work that we did with our IRL project, so doing other case studies with other orgs across the country, and getting a sense of how do we operationalize and measure working in this person centered, relational way that supports communities and is led by communities. So yeah, that’s one of the ways that the IRL has changed me, and that I used to introduce myself as a therapist. Now I say like I’m a therapist and a researcher. I want to like I want to keep doing this.

I really appreciate that as a function of the design of IRL and as a function of the culture of Boston GLASS, we we we have remained committed to serving LGBTQ+ youth of color by serving the LGBTQ+ staff of color that are working at these orgs. And so that has meant that our project shifted a lot. That means that this scrappiness and resilience that the community has because we’ve had to has shifted the way that our project looks. So our project has changed shape a bunch. The challenges that Boston GLASS is facing has changed a bunch, particularly in the current political climate. GLASS is being defunded, and so we we have this strategy of like staying putting the needs of the community first, no matter what the funders want, no matter what like the traditional academic institutions want, we’re here to serve the community first and foremost. And so this, like scrappiness and willingness to pivot, I think, is going to be baked into all of our future work together.

Shoba  28:01

Yeah, I think as part of our next steps, you know, as Davine said, we just put in this application yesterday. Fingers crossed.  But you know, we actually already had a funded grant together that was part of a larger center at Harvard that got terminated by the federal government. And so, you know, I think revising bits and pieces of that as well, because what we wanted to do is create an opportunity for a larger group to be part of this tent of community engaged, social justice focused researchers. So I think that’s also going to be part of it is sort of like bringing other, making it available and accessible to others who also want to be working in this way to whatever extent feels appropriate and available to them. But the idea that making that through line a little easier for them to see how their work can and should advance social justice, I think, feels like a really important part of what we can do together. Yeah. So I think the IRL experience has kind of put us on a really nice path to thinking about broadening the tent, but then also serving Boston GLASS. You know, part of our current project is thinking about, you know, where are there opportunities for GLASS to generate revenue as a function of some of the work that we’re doing? I don’t think that I would have thought of that on day one as part of what we were doing. It was more like, we’ll hand this off and people can do it but this is now just part of the project is we’re going to set things up in a way that prime the organization to be able to get those kinds of funds and sustain the wonderful work that they’re doing. So I think maybe it just feels like a little more pragmatic, right, like it’s, it’s always been the intent. I’m an implementation scientist, so my whole thing is supposed to be about helping research get into the world, but it’s still in an academic setting, so it still gets kind of, you know, wonky, and this is really about as Davine said, like centering the folks who the organization is serving. I think that’s that’s been a really nice shift, and I’m really glad that we got Davine hooked on research.

Davine 29:59

I didn’t see it coming.

J. Robin Moon 30:02

I think that’s another promising practice. And I do want to also comment for those listeners or watchers who are looking at our podcast, the the YouTube podcast, you can see this. You both look very bright and airy and happy when you talk about this work and about each other. I can see it visually, and I appreciate that.

Moving on to the next question, one of the core beliefs of this podcast team is summed up in the words of Octavia Butler when she says, “All that you touch you change, all that you change changes you”. Will each of you, please tell us briefly how IRL, our beloved community, has changed you, and how do you think you’ve changed the program and your community in return?

Shoba  30:52

So for me, IRL sort of has given me a wider set of options in terms of thinking about how I can create change, especially the idea of like small, local, accumulating change. I think that feels really doable, and especially at this moment, it feels sanity preserving, to feel like you can do these other things. I think from day one, we’ve been talking about what it means to build outside systems that don’t serve us. And I think IRL has made it a little bit more concrete about what that actually means. Like, it sounds great, but like, what do you do? And I think now, like in these groups, like, we’re really thinking about, like, these kinds of structures. And then for me, I think the last thing is, like, sort of this idea of being able to directly connect my values with my professional actions and knowing how to make them match more effectively. I think it’s a lifelong project, but that’s been really nice. And then Davine and I had the both had the reaction of, well, I don’t know how I changed. Anything like that feels really weird to talk about. So we decided that I would tell how Davine has changed IRL, and then she’ll do the same. So for me, and I think you actually saw it on the call earlier, one of the biggest impacts I think Davine has had on IRL are her thoughtful questions and the language that she uses to help people think about alternatives without feeling defensive. And I’m sure part of it is your social worker training, but part of it is just you. And so one of my favorite examples is when Davine started asking, you know, in our weekly calls, in the Zoom chat would often be saying, okay, literacy moment, what does this word mean? And earlier today, Mandy, when you were talking about phy ed, I didn’t know what that was either. I’ve heard physical education, phys ed, all kinds of other things, but never phy ed. Anyway, I could see Davine about to ask for a literacy moment, and then you said something that made it clear what it was. But I think again, just like that, normalizing the fact that, like, we accidentally use a lot of jargon, or we make assumptions about what folks do and don’t know, and there’s no shame in being like, “don’t know what you’re talking about”. I mean, Davine uses therapy words all the time. I don’t know what she’s talking about, so I can just ask her. But I think that just bringing that routinely in also made it feel like the space was not for academics or community partners or it’s just for all of us. So I think that’s a really nice contribution.

J. Robin Moon 33:16

You know, Mandy did that just to, just for you to make that point of demonstration.

Shoba  33:19

Thank you Mandy! That’s so kind of you! You made up a word just for that.

Mandy LeBreche  33:24

I did. No, but I appreciate that gift in yo, Davine, of being able to just question something is because, like, we’re, we’ve all been in situations where you’re in a group and someone’s talking about something and you have no idea what they’re talking about, but you’re like everyone else seems to know. So I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna ask or not gonna say anything, but I mean, that doesn’t put you at an advantage, so if you don’t know what’s being talked about. So I appreciate that.

Davine  33:49

I think that the IRL has really changed how I think about myself. I have often, like, I remember often being told, like, be a leader, not a follower. And I was like, “but why like what I don’t want to” it provided this opportunity for me to see myself as a leader, not in like this dominating, brash kind of way, but like leading by example, like leading by having the courage to ask questions, leading by connecting my community to resources, leading by questioning things that need to be changed, or like inviting people into thinking of alternatives, so that it has empowered me to speak about myself as a leader in different contexts, and that’s been helpful for me in various areas of my life.

Shoba, I feel like you bring this, this element to every space that we’re in, especially in person, where whatever we’re talking about, you’re going to, like, make it personal, like people will be presenting to us on a panel, and they’ll ask this really thoughtful question that really connects us to the humanity of what’s being done. And also, like, I appreciate the way that you have invited the group at large into action. We were, we were at an IRL convening when we got word that the federal government was pulling financial support from Harvard, and we weren’t really talking about that exactly, but you were like, “Hey, this is what’s going on in my world. It’s relevant to the social justice work that we’re doing”. And it was so cool for me to watch all these academics switch from theorizing to practice, where people were like, ready to step in seeing somebody that they had a relationship with who was losing resources, ready to act, ready to like, come together and build something different, ready to think outside the box and think outside the current systems of, how are we going to keep moving this work forward? So I that’s something that’s the way that I think you’ve changed this community.

Mandy LeBreche  35:51

You two are so creative. I mean the intros, and then I loved how you just did that with that question.

Shoba  35:56

Creative… obstinate… whatever.

Mandy LeBreche  36:02

Creative. All right. Final question is, working towards equity and against systems of oppression can take its toll? Can you each please share with our listeners how you engage in self care as you do this difficult and important work.

Speaker 4  36:19

For me, it’s music and birds. I have a lot of tailored playlists. I’ve been listening to my playlist of songs that make me happy recently, I’m like, I might go to the apocalyptic bops playlist mix. And I have been like, looking out the window, looking at different birds. I enjoy the Merlin app that helps me identify what the birds are. And then if I hear, I know there’s a cardinal out here somewhere, because I’ve been hearing it, but I haven’t seen it yet. So my self care today is going to be looking for the Cardinal.

Shoba  36:48

My self care is really making time to just be with people in person. Like, whenever I get the chance, like, it’s just, I’ve realized how much it’s a defense, you know, like, or it shores up your defenses. So that’s been really, really necessary at this time. I think the other thing is crafts. So as part of getting ready for my aroma therapy, slash craft drop, I’ve just been doing all kinds of crafts. So like, every night I’m just doing or, like, for a week, I’ll just do the same craft, type of craft every night, you know, and then I’ll switch to something else. Like, right now, I’m doing gel prints, making a lot of cards, if anybody needs any. But, you know, it’s really like, you’re just thinking about that. I often do this stuff with my 10 year old, who’s also really good friends with Davine and, you know, so that’s, that’s also really nice, but, yeah, just totally different part of your brain, really fun, and I don’t necessarily need to keep everything. I can just recycle it. And so there’s no pressure.

Mandy LeBreche  37:50

I love it. I love that we asked that question, because I always need different ideas for myself. So I love hearing what other folks are doing. I love that. Well, that’s a wrap. Shoba and Davine, thank you so much for joining us. We loved hearing your stories and about the work that you do and your experience in the IRL program. We’re so lucky to know you both, and we appreciate you both sharing today.

Shoba  38:14

Thank you for making it so easy and comfortable.

J. Robin Moon 38:17

Thank you all, and thank you to our listeners. We’d love to hear from you, what promising practices are you using in your work to achieve health equity? Find us on the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders LinkedIn page, where you can share your thoughts and leave questions for the team. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you’d never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us on this journey where every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time, take care.

Mandy LeBreche  39:05

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

A Conversation with Team North Port St. Joe (Cohort 7)

Season 2, Episode 2 | August 28, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee and J. Robin Moon
• Guests: Dannie E. Bolden, Dr. Kwame N. Owusu-Daaku, and Dr. Christian Wells

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:21

Hello and welcome back to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m your host. Krystal Lee and my co host today is J Robin Moon, Associate Director of Research Evaluation and Dissemination for IRL. Hey Robin!

J. Robin Moon 00:43

Hi Krystal!

Krystal Lee  00:45

As we mentioned in our prologue, this season of Promising Practices will feature the experiences, stories and lessons of our IRL fellows. Today, we have the immense pleasure of talking with our IRL Cohort 7 team from North Port St Joe, Florida. We are happy to welcome Danny Bolden, Christian Wells, Kwame Owusu Daaku to the podcast. Welcome friends!

J. Robin Moon 01:13

We’re so glad to have you with us today. Before we ask you to tell us about yourselves and your work, we invite you to engage with us in one of our IRL signature, promising practices, checking in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building communities that collaborate effectively in the work towards health equity. So at the beginning of all our meetings at IRL, we do a quick check in to help us continuously build connections in our beloved community. So today, check in question: What is the most memorable summer produce that you’ve eaten in the last week? I will go first. I’ve just been eating… I’ve been doing, like, smoothies, protein powder, smoothies for breakfast. Huge, like, revolutionary change of eating carbs based food in the last two decades, and I’ve been buying strawberries and other berries, blueberries… All the berries are in season at farmers markets. I’ve been buying them more than I ever have in my adult life, memory. So that’s what I will say. I’m going to toss it to Krystal

Krystal Lee  02:19

As you know, Robin, my garden has been struggling this year, so I haven’t reaped anything that I have been able to eat from my own garden. But we have been buying the summer berries, and my husband has been making me berry lemonade. So like raspberry lemonade, strawberry lemonade with actual like, limes and strawberries that  blend ourselves, and it is phenomenal. Those supermarket lemonades could never! It is the best thing. It’s the best thing that I’ve had all summer.

J. Robin Moon 02:54

Miss Mocktail!

Krystal Lee  02:59

Yep! Ms. Mocktail! I will toss it to Kwame..

Kwame Owusu Daaku  03:02

Feel you on the homemade lemonade. So for me, I had a very delicious, perfect size set of apples in New Zealand. It was like, you know, sometimes you get an apple and it’s just too much apple, you know, for one serving. But this was the perfect size, and it was very delicious. And it wasn’t even necessarily tagged as organic, you know? And so, yeah, I think I would move to New Zealand for the fruits and vegetables alone. So I’ll toss it to Danny.

Dannie Bolden  03:37

Uh, yes, I have been enjoying cucumbers, enjoying tomatoes. And of course, you’ve seen the zucchini and the squash. Oh man, let me tell you. We listen. We have a nice sized garden in the back, and I grow a lot of peppers and stuff. And so, you know, just recently, with the zucchini and the squash. My wife has been creating these phenomenally delicious dishes with with the squash and stuff. And, of course, she takes the cucumbers and she makes a dip out of them that we then dip the zucchini in when it’s, you know, sort of fried in olive oil. So now, we’re really into growing our own vegetables and fruits and things, and we grow… we got potatoes that are going to be coming up here. I’m going to be harvesting soon, and then during the winter months, we do cabbage and kale and all that. So we eat fresh vegetables all the time. So I’m just excited about the harvest that we’re getting this year. And of course, I try to share with my neighbors, because I used to grow more than I can consume myself.

J. Robin Moon 04:41

amazing.

Christian Wells  04:44

Well, they have federal they have Federal Express, so you can share with us too.

Dannie Bolden  04:50

Alright, yeah, well, I’m going to toss it to you Christian, and you know that I always bring you peppers. So you know when I see you in August, you will get your abundant package.

J. Robin Moon 04:59

You know, Christian is a chef in the house.

Christian Wells  05:04

I did. I did. I spent one of my sabbaticals going to cooking classes, and I learned how to cook and how to hold a knife. And so I, I think that’s real important for anybody. And I still, I, anytime I see Danny, he brings me some vegetables, and they’re probably still some in the freezer. Well, in Florida, it is not berry season, so we don’t have our delicious strawberries and blueberries. They come from California and Canada nowadays, but pretty much year round in Florida, depending on which neighbor is growing it, you can always get some delicious tomatoes, or as my mom calls them, maters. So you can always get your maters somewhere. And this week, I’ve certainly had some delicious tomatoes from somebody’s backyard. All you need is a little bit of salt and pepper on it, you know, slice it, leave it out on the cutting board, put a little salt and pepper on it, and then walk away for half an hour, come back and they’re ready to go. Delicious

J. Robin Moon 06:02

Dream. Yeah, know what I mean. I love this team.

Krystal Lee  06:09

We discovered my family and I discovered tomato sandwiches a couple of years ago. Yes, and in the summertime, there’s a farm stand down the street and we grab our tomatoes and do exactly what you were just saying, Christian, and it is phenomenal.

Well, thank you all for joining us again today. I want to give you an opportunity to tell our listeners about yourselves. So how about we start with Mr Danny, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Dannie Bolden  06:41

Sure, listen, I’m Danny Bolden, and grew up in Port Saint Joe, Florida, and I am a community change agent. Okay, that is what I truly aspire to be. And the work that I’ve done in the community has been really focused around the fact that as a community change agent, you have to be prepared not only to identify what the issues are in your community that need change, but also be willing to speak truth to power, especially when there’s change that needs to take place. And so the work is challenging because sometimes you have to rub against the grain. In other words, a lot of times power doesn’t want to hear that there’s something wrong. They want to people just to go along. So in terms of the work that I and who I am, I’m the person that I will go out and seek out the opportunity to make the change and be willing to speak to power and to be able to stand forward on truth, to my truth that I believe, and I believe that the inequities that the community, that of North Port St Joe has experienced all of my life has been something that needed to be addressed. And so after coming back to my hometown, I said, Look, I’m in a situation now, financially and in my career, where I can actually speak truth to power and try to invoke the change. So that’s who I am. I stand on that I’m prepared to do whatever I have to do to improve the conditions in my community, and we’ll talk more about what those issues are, but that’s who I am, and that’s what I stand on as a human being. I am prepared to deal with the situation as it comes forward, but I’m not going to back down. I know that I need to do this work. This is a part of who I am. 

Kwame Owusu Daaku  08:26

So my name is Kwame Owusu Daaku, and I really care about justice. I think it took me a while to realize that, but that’s probably the driving force of everything I do, everything I aspire to, even one of my favorite Bible verses talks about seeking justice, love and mercy and walking humbly with your God. And so, yeah, it’s, I think, even learning the difference between equity and equality, you know, probably as a first year college student, and then even later, recognizing that there are some situations where equality, you know, is necessary, not just equity, and other situations where we can’t be treating everyone the same, and we need to give redress to people who have been harmed historically and, you know, are being harmed currently. And I think that is all mediated by the concept of justice, like doing what is right, you know, and giving people what they deserve. And so that’s what, like really permeates everything I do, or my thinking that, you know, justice be served. And I think even before my present occupation, I always wanted to be a lawyer, and it wasn’t something, it’s something I couldn’t shake, you know, for the longest time, and someway, somehow, and I wanted to be a criminal justice lawyer, and then, you know, now I’m a professor, but I find that that desire for justice, you know, always, like, has been present with me, yeah, so that’s, like, sort of my driving force.

Christian Wells  09:56

Well, I’m Christian Wells, I’m a professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida in Tampa. And I guess when people ask, you know who are you? I can I can tell them. You remember that song Loretta Lynn, a coal miner’s daughter. I am the son of a coal miner’s daughter. My mom grew up in the hollers in West Virginia, and my grandfather was worked in the coal mines. And eventually, you know, we we got out of that situation. But just growing up in that context and and hearing the stories from my mom, you know, always keeps me grounded about who I am and who my family is, and how I was raised. And we grew up with a lot of environmental injustices. And in fact, in that that song by Loretta Lynn, there’s a lyric toward the end of the song where she says, I remember well, the well where I drew water. And it just is a very powerful line that says, you know, wherever I am today, I’m humbled by my beginnings and where I am, and I always stay connected to that. So I feel, you know, wherever I go, I try to remember the well where I drew water from, and I bring that with me into a lot of the work that I do. And just like Danny and Kwame, you know, a lot of their work is about justice and about environmental justice. So that’s the work that I’ve been doing with with my colleagues for, you know, quite a number of years.

J. Robin Moon 11:22

Thank you so much. So let’s just dive into this. Please tell us the story of how you came to your health equity work and what health equity looks like to you. I know you already kind of went into it straight already. Let’s start with Christian and go the other order.

Christian Wells  11:37

Alright, our group started. You really have to ask Kwame. He is our leader. He pulled us together and told us about health equity and told us about these experiences that we could have with the IRL program. But for me, I think I’ve always been doing health equity work, and I never knew it. I always thought that my umbrella that I did everything under was environmental justice. But as more and more I learned about health equity, I realized that environmental justice is underneath a broader umbrella of health equity. And so I think I’ve just been, you know, invested in it for such a long time, and not really realizing it. But for me, health equity is about freedom to make decisions, freedom to have agency when it comes to your health and well being. And I know we live, as an Anthropologist, I know we live in in a world not of our own, partly of our own making, and not of our own making in many times. And a lot of our decisions are constrained in many ways. And often we feel like we have decision making authority or we have capacity to make decisions when, in fact, our decisions are very constrained and sometimes even made for us. And so I think health equity is really about a process. It’s not a thing that you arrive at, but it’s a process understanding those kinds of structures and and coming up with ways to enable you and build capacity in you and the communities around you for your ability to participate meaningfully in making decisions about your health and well being

J. Robin Moon 13:07

Beautiful. Kwame…

Kwame Owusu Daaku  13:11

How do I come to health equity work? So in my varied interests, I almost got a PhD in public health, almost like it was just. It was a matter of, who gave me more money I will confess. And so I realized, again, like talking about that draw of justice being the thread, even when it came to health, public health, and I was very interested in community work and community change and social change in really related to the health space. And my Masters is in urban planning, and urban planning and public health, you know, basically come from the same source, you know. And so I think health equity was always in the back of my mind, even though I didn’t realize that’s what it was. And I was always drawn to issues of equity. So it really didn’t matter whether it was health or environment or society, whatever it was, as long as trying to see justice served. And so this almost felt natural when I learned about the IRL program and what it stood for and its goal. And yeah, I think for me, it’s always been about equity. So just tag anything else, and I’m there.

J. Robin Moon 14:23

I know that this program was made for you [unini]. Danny,

Dannie Bolden  14:29

well, I came to this as Christian did, through Dr. Kwame, in terms of this IRL work, but the work that I’ve been doing over the last 30 years has been centered around housing, economic development, and a lot of the work that I was doing, I realized that education and all of that stuff sort of tied in to what builds a community. And what really drove me towards really getting involved with the health equity work is. My mom, who died from cancer, who lived on a paper mill landfill site that had basically had all types of chemicals that was buried there that had gotten into the groundwater. For years, she had been ingesting the toxic fumes that came from the paper mill in a chemical plant, and she died at an early age. My mom was 62 years old, but she was a very, very outgoing and healthy person. But all of a sudden, one day, we found out she had cancer. And so doing the work that I was doing as it related to housing and all the other stuff, I realized that, hey, there’s got to be something going on here in the soil, there’s got to be something that’s going on in this water, in the air, that’s impacting the people in our community. So I begin to start looking at, how does all these things connect together, the landfill, housing, sinking contaminated water and all that. And I realized that there, for all of the years that the paper mill had doing all of this waste and dump in the air and in the water. There had never been any health monitoring done in the community. So once the paper mill left, they left all of these basically byproducts in the soil, in the water and everything. And people were still living on this land. And so I realized that the only way that we were going to be able to address this is to find ways to address not only the environmental issues that were happening in the soil and in the water, but what, how did that interface with the illnesses that we had, the high levels of cancer, diabetes and other related illnesses. And so, you know, the health care system in Port Saint Joe was always sort of minimal when it came down to the black community and access to the care. They really didn’t have an active hospital that was there. But the fact is that people were dying, and no one had ever taken the time to do the research to see if that was a relationship there. So when this opportunity came to really try to drill down on what the causes was and what some of the effects it was having on the community I saw this is a great opportunity to work with two gentlemen that I have highest regards for, who are very, very good at this work, and I’ve learned a great deal from them, but my community itself is still in a state of despair. And so this work requires that you know that I continue to do what I do in terms of trying to raise the level of awareness, that we get some health monitoring done in the community, that we do the things that can address these system issues. And I can tell you right now, North Port St Joe is still in the same state it was when I came home 25 years ago, and that there has been a lack of investment in the community itself. There’s the housings after Hurricane Michael, were basically left in disarray, but they were before that, they were in disarray and decay, and we have high levels of mold in a lot of these homes, and about 14% of them now are uninhabitable. And so there has to be a relationship, a causal relationship, between the health issues and the soil. And so this work has given me an opportunity to see and bring a group of people together in the community to find out that we’re not in this alone. There are other people that are thinking the same thing. We just gotta figure out how we can work together. So this work has given me the opportunity to build some collaborative partners and some coalitions with some organizations of people that I think that will be able to help us to address these systemic issues there. And what does health equity mean to me? It means dignity. It means choice. It means a healthy and safe environment in which you live, as well as having access to adequate health care so you don’t die from something like my mom died from without anybody giving her any kind of indication that this was an environment that you could actually die from cancer, by just living in this community,

Krystal Lee  18:57

Thanks so much for sharing that. Mr. Danny, we’ll talk a little bit more about the community and as it relates to your team project in a little bit. But I wanted to ask Kwame, could you tell us a little bit about your experience with the IRL program?

Kwame Owusu Daaku  19:15

So there’s an interesting pattern in my life when it comes to applying for things. I always, well, not always, let me not change it, but I I often get whatever I apply for the second time round, never the first. You know, almost any grant or fellowship that I’ve applied for, it’s always second time around. So the first time, it was another colleague at the University of West Florida who brought the IRL program to my attention. So this for cohort six. And so they had, since they brought up the idea, sort of they kind of determined the focus. And I believe I did try to work with Danny at that point, I’m not sure, or someone else from 14, Joe and I, we applied, but it didn’t quite, you know, work out, you know. So the year after the application cycle was when Danny, Chris and I started working together more with Port Saint Joe, or in Port Saint Joe. And that’s when, sort of, so when the second … 7th cohort application came around, I was like, Guys, this is perfect. Like, I think we are, you know, we are ripe for this. We’re already doing the work, and it still has to do with structural racism in health. And so I think my experience with IO has been nothing short of, I would say, life changing or phenomenal. Like, it’s the first time I’ve been part of a fellowship program, having been part of so many but where, I think, even coming to the first, you know, meeting, I was like, Oh my gosh. Like, these people believe us, especially when it comes to, like, even what we spent and what we didn’t spend, like, it was like, oh, there’s no, they’re not like, nitpicking. I don’t know like, so I don’t know if this is, if I should be saying this on on the on this podcast, but when you deal with university, like budgeting offices, like they nitpick everything to the last cent, you know? And so in my mind, I was kind of expecting that kind of treatment, but I was like, No, back to Danny’s earlier point of dignity. You know, I really felt that this was a fellowship that saw us as people and believed us and treated us with dignity. So it’s been really encouraging and inspiring to see even the breadth and scope of health equity work, you know, across the nation, and to meet with like minded people when we have our annual meetings and annual gatherings, and yeah, for me, it’s just been been a really encouraging and positive experience to be part of this program.

Christian Wells  21:46

Well, I’m glad, I’m glad you didn’t wait till cohort eight, Kwame.

Dannie Bolden  21:56

same here. Chris, yeah.

J. Robin Moon 22:01

Mr. Danny, I have another question for you. Tell us about the your team. I know you already got into a little bit, but tell us about your team project and tell us the name of the… for our audience. Tell us the name of your project and how the community where your research is based in and you are the community partner of the community. 

Dannie Bolden  22:21

Yeah, I’m going to make sure I get the right proper name of it so I don’t miss speak that on here just a second. Okay? It is “Transformative scenario planning to envision health equity in the future”. And this is for the community of North Port St Joe, Florida. And we really tried to drill down on what were some of the the opportunities, you know, to really build some transformative planning scenarios around trying to address what we had come to the earlier research that had been done through our health department, as well as some of the other assessments that have been done through the University of Florida, West Florida, as well as the University of South Florida. And so we begin. We really wanted to focus on the community. Let’s bring the community folks together so that we can get a clear understanding of what the issues were. And as it relates to our community, we knew, you know, that there was definitely some systemic racial issues in Housing and Economic Development, and so the health piece was really an opportunity for us to bring together, you know, the community residents, as well as bringing in, we had some folks from the health department and other folks to actually come in and see if there was a way that We could actually look at how to create a future in healthcare delivery that would allow us to actually change the trajectory that the community was on. And so, you know, I’m I can tell you the the research and the work that was done was beautiful, but what was so enlightening for me was the community engagement piece of it, because the community actually helped us to identify what some of the disparities were as well as what some of the barriers were, and actually help us to come up with some strategies that was able to help us to address those issues in a way that I think, going forward, we have some successful opportunities before us, and I’ll let one of the professors sort of go dive deeper into it.

J. Robin Moon 24:23

I’m gonna go to Christian with that question. So transformative scenario planning is not something we see often in, you know, public health intervention programs. And this is really innovative in that you think about the future and reimagine the future, instead of just thinking about getting rid of something that is not working. And that is asset based, and that is truly community engaging and collaborative. So this is a very, very interesting project for us to even review your application. So Christian, going from Mr. Ian, tell us about the promising practice, or practices, can be more than one, practices that have emerged from your IRL project thus far.

Christian Wells  25:10

Yes. So our promising practice is just what you mentioned, transformative scenario planning, and this is a holistic planning approach that brings together a diverse group of people, some of whom hopefully are influential in terms of decision making, but really unique, there’s some this is a group of people that are sometimes includes folks that are maybe too polarized in their positions to work together, to commit sort of collective action, to imagine and work toward a better future. And that’s what’s you know unique about it is this bringing people together with opposing viewpoints. And the the idea is to promote, assist, promote a structural transformation, or system transformation, by centering individuals and their shared experiences through something that, in the literature we call situated learning, and that’s an approach to learning that emphasizes the participatory nature of knowledge production through, for example, mentoring and apprenticing. This is something that you see, certainly in my field of anthropology, but in many other fields that we call a community of practice, and that’s a group of people who learn collaboratively by interacting and developing shared understandings, and you need look no further than the IRL program for this. The IRL program, our cohorts are transformative scenario planning groups. We are a community of practice. We are a group of influential and diverse actors. Some of us are really polarized in our decisions. We don’t all agree about everything, but we come together and we work collaboratively as a community of practice to try to envision what the possibility for Health Equity could be, and then what kinds of strategies we can take individually, in our own lives and in our professional lives to move that, that needle. So I think that our our promising practice, the TSP, the transformative scenario planning practice, is very much like the IRL program. It is a community of practice.

J. Robin Moon 27:15

That’s a huge compliment, that you are a light, you know, making a comparison of your your amazing program to us. Thank you.

Christian Wells  27:22

It makes our work easy, because we just go to the IRL program meetings and take all of the good ideas and steal them and come back to our community and work with our community. And it’s great. It’s super easy. 

Dannie Bolden  27:36

It’s a team sport too. That’s what it is, you guys. It’s a team sport. We’re not alone. Absolutely.

Kwame Owusu Daaku  27:44

Just wanted to chime in with one other like outcome of this work is that. So I think in our situation, the plan didn’t necessarily work out, you know, as envisioned, because, as you know, Danny, Danny and Christian pointed out, the problems are structural, and we needed local governance to sort of be on board with the change. And so that’s why we even selected the transformative scenario approach, because it gets people who are often polarized, you know, hopefully, as they envision the future together, they are willing to transform it by seeing each other differently, you know, not just seeing each other in their professional roles, but also as like human beings, you know, again, talking about to Danny’s point, that’s what the IRL program did for us, you know, really centered us as individuals and acknowledge us as people and give us dignity. And so hopefully they would have that experience. But then the city government, whom we really needed to be present, you know, was not present, you know. But a promising practice that really emerged, and to Danny’s point was it really built the capacity of the people who did attend to want to take local action. You know, Danny can report that there are many people who, before those workshops that we had, maybe were not as engaged or not as willing to take initiative or take the lead on projects, who are now, like very much taking the lead on things, and are attending more community events and things like that. And so even though, yes, we didn’t get the city government on board and no promising, you know, a bucket list of items, the people who did show up for these workshops, you know, were very much, yeah, inspired and encouraged, you know, to take matters into their own hands. And so I think even if the plan doesn’t work out, how you you envision, you know, the people who do show up, you know, do get a lot out of the experience.

Christian Wells  29:33

Yeah, I’ll just add that, even though we didn’t get the city really involved, even though we didn’t really get the city involved, we created the conditions conducive to change. We created… We took the baton while we had it and ran as fast as we could. And we’re we’re still going to run, but we’re also handing off the baton to the next generation that can take it forward. So it was a really important period, I think, in the evolution of what’s going on in North Port St Joe

J. Robin Moon 30:00

I love that, and you have just begun. You’re not done yet.

Krystal Lee  30:07

I want to invite you all to follow along the trajectory that Christian was just talking about, where he said, like, giving the baton to the next generation. So how I want you all to, like, cast your eyes towards the future, right? We’ve talked about in our last one of our last October meetings, we talked about like envisioning possibilities and and dreaming towards the future. And so I wonder if you could share with us, like, what do you think are the next steps for the work that you are doing in North Port, St Joe, and how do you see the lessons that you’ve learned being applied to the work for health equity? Maybe we can start with Mr. Danny, and then the others can jump in as they see fit.

Dannie Bolden  30:53

Well, I have to say, the work that we’ve done so far, I think, as Christian and Kwame both said, you know, I think we’ve laid a great foundation in terms of the community realizing that together there, there’s power there. They can actually be able to move this, this transformative work that we’ve done to the next level. And the IRL giving us this opportunity to pull this together. And one of the things that was so beautiful about it was bringing these people together. We did three retreats, and from those retreats, those folks bonded together in a way that I think that as we look at what’s next, and we’re going to be talking about what’s next, I talked to Kwame and and Christian about, you know, how do we build on the work that has been done, rather than just as most things in the community, people say, Okay, we had a meeting. We did this. We can’t…  What are we going to do after this is over? Put it on the shelf, or we’re going to go back and say, what’s the next steps to move us forward? So I envision this work not just ending when the IRL piece ends. I envision this work moving to another level. We’re going to be meeting here in August to really talk about how we can actually move that ball to the next level. So Krystal, I hope I answered your question, but that, to me, is such a paramount piece of this work. I’ve done so much research and so many different projects that I’ve been on over the years where there was a paper written, a white paper, there was a grant written, it was put on the shelf, and that was the end of it. But this work is so important that it has to be moved to the next level. And so I’m hoping that upon the work that’s being done, we’ve got a group of folks in the community who says, Look, they’re craving this. We had most of the people who started out with us in the first workshop, came to the second workshop, came to the third workshop. We lost a few, but the true, the true essence of the work, was one, and the way it was presented was in such an informative way that people want to see this move, because it is a big concern to the community, and so we gotta now broaden our net. We’ve gotta, if we can’t reach the all of the elected officials in the city or the county, we gotta cherry pick. Maybe we get one here, one there, but we’ve gotta continue this work and take it to the next level.

Christian Wells  33:18

I think we learned two really important things by doing this project. The first is that, you know, even though we were doing this kind of transformative scenario planning, what we were really doing was building capacity for engagement. And at the end of the day, even though we have these scenarios, you know, planned, it’s really about getting people involved in the community. And I think that’s one of the successes of the project. The other thing that we learned, that I learned, I don’t know about my colleagues, but you know, we went into this thinking about all the problems that are in North Port St Joe that Danny beautifully articulated, all the health problems, all the environmental problems, and when we approached the TSP planning process and the retreats as a bunch of problems, people were, you know, tired, tired of hearing about the problems, tired of being involved in the problems. But what the IRL taught us was to flip the script and talk about the future. What do people envision for the future? What are their dreams? And so when we approached the planning process in terms of dreaming about the good things of the future, everybody suddenly, you know, light clicked on, and people wanted to be involved and engaged in that. They didn’t want to be engaged in problems and problem solving. They wanted to be involved in the dream work, the dream work that makes the team work. And so we’ve totally for me, anyway, I’ve totally redesigned the way I approach problems now and and approach them in terms of people’s future and the dreams they have for the future and their children, instead of just constantly saying, This is bad, this is bad. This is bad. Nobody likes that kind of stigma, but people like to be involved in that kind of dream work. So that was one, one big outcome that I had not anticipated at all for this project that I’m very happy with.

J. Robin Moon 35:08

That’s beautiful. Well, in that spirit. Danny, everybody here, you will now say, if elect elected official, you’ll say when, when they will come. You will manifest this. Okay, yeah, going with that Christian you? You set me up for the next question in the flow, one of the core beliefs of this podcast team is summed up in the words of Octavia Butler when she says, All that you touch you change, all that you change changes you. So now let’s talk a little bit about your personal aspect. Will, each of you share with you, with us, how IRL, our beloved community, has changed you. And how do you think that you’ve changed the program, really briefly. Who wants to start maybe Kwame…

Kwame Owusu Daaku  35:57

or the second part is harder… how I’ve changed the program? For sure, I don’t know about that, but I will say IRL has changed me. I think it’s helped me lean into parts of myself that I before the program, you know, kept separate, you know, especially when we did the storytelling workshop, you know, asking us to tell stories and me sharing poetry that I had written like a very long time ago. I was like, Yeah, I don’t have to sort of hide this part of myself or keep this part of myself, like, separate, you know, from the work that I do, and I can incorporate it, you know, into what I do. And there’s even stuff that I would do in class that I would never bring up, like, with my colleagues who had a meeting or stuff like that, you know. So, but it’s just, it’s just helped me think more holistically about who I am and try to bring all of myself to bear in any given context, you know. And so I really appreciate that about, you know, the program, and I think even from, like, a co leadership standpoint, you know, it’s helped me. Also, I just realized just to let some things go, you know, and then also, yeah, just allow the process to unfold, you know, the way it does, which is sort of even the spirit of the transformative scenario process, to just let it be emergent and not hold on so strongly to what the plan was, but then to allow the practice to sort of determine the final product. Yeah, so…

Dannie Bolden  37:30

I’ll quickly add. Christian, Kwame, you were absolutely spot on. You know, the thing is, for me, it was stepping into an orbit somewhat where I was, I was real hopeful. The expectations were somewhat okay. Maybe, you know. But what I got out of this was it lit a fire under me, simply because I realized that we wasn’t alone, this orbit that we were in with IRL was a lot of folks who had a lot of different strong beliefs in things that they wanted to see change. And the fact that it was such a diverse group of folks, it really lit a fire under me, and, you know, and I, you know, stepping into a policy environment, which, you know, it’s not something that structurally, that I was always used to, but the way that the policy and the way the structure was set up, I learned a great deal from it. Okay, and so, leaving this, this, this project, I’m gonna I’ve got so many tools now, different tools that have been introduced into my process, into my thinking, things that you know, that you know, that I’ve never had the opportunity to to learn or to be exposed to, and so this is, this is really for me, it’s been an experience that would allow me to be able to take some of these tools that I’ve learned and to do my community building work, to do my advocacy work in my community change work, while at the same time Taking some of these tools that I’ve learned, I’m sharing them with people in my world, in my spirit, and saying, Hey, this is a new learning experience for me. Let me share this information with you. And one of the things I’ve done, I’ve got this little notebook full of all the little things that we’ve got that I you know, my, my, my, we need to be building future leaders, community change agents, the people who are engaged in, you know, trying to change and create equity in whatever arena is this. And so to me, this has been that opportunity for me to build my knowledge base. But I want to share that we need to build more advocates for change, more people who would engage in this work. So that’s been one of the joys of of this whole journey. And of course, I have to give us a shameless plug for my two partners, cohorts with me. They have instilled, listen, they have put a lot into the work, but I’ve learned so much from these two gentlemen here. And so it is just so fantastic to. Be able to work with two gentlemen who have just been, you know, we might have differences, but we didn’t differ in a way that it was adversary. It was always everybody agreed. And I’ll be honest with you, I can’t think of one thing that we had. It couldn’t mediate, that didn’t get solved in a very easy because these guys are just, you know, they’re just wonderful gentlemen to work with. So IRL introduced me to them in a different light, because I knew both of them before that.

Christian Wells  40:32

Well, thank you for calling us gentlemen. Danny, I never heard that. Oh, there’s a couple of things for me that IRL did, one was the realization that I could advocate for communities and people that I did not know. You know, for years I spent working directly with very specific communities, and I felt comfortable advocating for them in different capacities, but never wanted to reach sort of beyond that. And IRL really shows you that you don’t have to know somebody individually to advocate on their behalf. That was really very powerful for me, and that’s going to evolve and transform as I move forward. And the other thing is that IRL did was really teach me about advocacy and activism, and I had approached working with communities, as sort of speaking on behalf of Communities, and understanding and telling this, you know, hearing them and then telling their stories and and I learned that that approach can often recreate the kind of structural racism and colonial kind of structures that we’re all embedded in. And maybe sometimes a better approach is to simply help people tell their own story, help people have a greater voice, so that that their voice is still center, and you’re just helping to make it louder, you know. So I learned a lot about, I think, advocacy through through that way, through IRL,

J. Robin Moon 41:58

amplifying the existing voice, rather than speaking for them.

Krystal Lee  42:02

This has been, this has been perfect. We one of the things that has become clear to us as we’ve been doing this project is that, you know, the work to what Kwame mentioned, emergence, emergence. And you know we’ve, we’ve been talking about emergent strategies, and we’ve been, over the last year, looking at books like practical radicals and for pivots. And there’s so many lessons that have come for my for me individually, but also, I think, for others as well, about how do we practice and grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds that we long for, that we are working towards. How are we working and what are we doing to embody health equity? And you know, in four pivots, Doctor Sean Jin Wright talks about self care and healing yourself. And you know, doing things that allow the allow our movements to be sustainable because we are taking care of ourselves and making sure that we have what we need. And so I wonder in our work towards health equity and against systems of oppression. As a final thought, can you all share with our listeners, how do you conceptualize and how do you engage in self care as you do this work. Let me start with Christian.

Christian Wells  43:25

For me, self care has changed, you know, throughout my career, and I’ve really come to understand it very differently, right in the place that I’m in now. For me, self care is family care, and I get my own self care by caring for my family. And that really grounds me. That really helps me remember the well I drew water from that really, you know, brings me back to why it is I’m here on Earth, and so I engage in family care practices, whether it’s staying home and taking care of people, or, more often than not, cooking, you know, that’s a big thing that I love to do for other people, and especially my family. So if I want to feel better about a day that’s gone terribly wrong and terrible problems, I’ll go home and I’ll cook a delicious meal. And if it’s a beautiful, fabulous, wonderful meal, you know, I’ve had a really horrible day, beautiful.

Dannie Bolden  44:24

Well, self care for me is, is just what I showed you earlier. I mean, I go out in my garden and I my plants, we talk, I play music to them, we entertain each other, especially when I go out there. And you know, when you look one day and there’s nothing there, and then you pull a leaf back, and there’s a big zucchini there, and you’re like, Where was this yesterday? Did this thing? It’s like magic. But the other thing is, I enjoy my family. We, you know, we do a lot of things together. We have a camper. We load up in the camper, and, you know, we go out and we camp, and we do stuff like that. One of the things that’s really. Refreshing, and has been really sort of like a burden lifted is this work, and just the fact that we built these collaborative and added more people to the work, I feel almost like, Thank You, Jesus. You know it’s because there’s more people in the battle. And so you know, self care for me is just going to meetings with the CDC, with the coalition, and seeing these people, all you know, inspired to do this work. And I think to myself, Well, I think I had a little something to do with it, and I feel good about that. I feel like I’ve done something that has been rewarding for me, but also given to others. So again, me and my garden, we cool every afternoon, when the sun goes down, we’re out there talking to each other, and that is the most solace that I have. And the best feeling for me is putting my hands in the dirt and moving that dirt around.

J. Robin Moon 45:54

That’s right, beautiful.

Kwame Owusu Daaku  45:57

I do want to agree with my colleagues on even this notion of self care in service to others. You know, it might sound sort of atypical to be like, Well, we said self care. Why are you talking about doing more stuff? But it’s not doing more stuff. It’s when you even in the moment of, I’ve had a really long day saying I’m going to, like, wash the dishes or do something, you know, again, serving those closest to you or those around you. I think there’s a lot of healing in that, you know, because we are sort of connected individuals. On on top of that, one thing that I do is I sleep a lot like, if I know that I don’t have to go anywhere and I can like, I will sleep. I was, I would just like, you know, so I always, like, love the opportunity to just sleep with no agenda. I know that I don’t have to be up at any time, you know, that kind of thing. And it usually helps me reset, especially for the week, you know. So like, on a weekend, or just have a long Sunday afternoon up and then, like, I’m good, you know, first of the week. So I do sleep a lot to take care of myself.

J. Robin Moon 47:04

Beautiful self care in service to others. Reminds me of the word Ubuntu. I am because you are. Think that’s what you’re speaking of, Kwame Danny and Christian. This was the perfect Episode One for the season two that we can we’re kicking off. Thank you so much for being part of our tribe. We are as blessed and lucky to have you as you might feel that you know you have us so thank you so much for sharing your story for Team North Port Saint Joe with us today. We deeply appreciate your insights. 

Dannie Bolden  47:37

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Krystal Lee  47:41

Yes. Thank you all so much for being here with us and for sharing your stories with us. There are so many lessons and tidbits and nuggets that I think folks can take away from your shared experience and apply to the work that we’re all trying to do to achieve health equity for all. So again, thank you for being here with us and thank you to our listeners as always, we want this to be a two way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you, what promising practices are you using in your work to achieve health equity. What promising practices did you hear about in today’s episode that you think might be applicable to the work that you are doing? Share with us your thoughts on our interdisciplinary research leaders LinkedIn page. You can share your thoughts there, and you can leave questions for the team. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us on this journey where every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world, until next time

Mandy LeBreche  48:48

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation. You.

Welcome to Season 2!

Season 2, Episode 1 | August 14, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee, J. Robin Moon, Cody Cotton, and Mandy LaBreche

Krystal Lee  0:00

Hello and Welcome to Season Two of promising practices for health equity, the podcast created by the interdisciplinary research Leaders program where we explore innovative and actionable strategies to create a fairer and healthier world. I’m your host, Krystal Lee, and I am joined by my awesome colleagues and CO hosts. J Robin Moon, Mandy LaBreche and Cody Cotton, Hey, friends!

Cody Cotton  01:53

hey.

Krystal Lee  01:55

So of course, you know, I have to start with a check in and the check in question is, what is something that is quietly bringing you peace or joy right now. I will start. I have taken up woodworking and also continuing with my learning how to restore furniture. So I recently restored a Harris and Henkel, Henkel Harris – whatever, a piece of furniture that I found for $20 at the second hand place. It’s a $1,300 piece, and I love it, and I just refinished it. It’s, it’s, it’s solid mahogany. And I took off the old varnish and the old stain, and it’s beautiful, and I love it. And when I go home, I’m going to put on the new pulls that I bought for it, and then it’s going to go in my bedroom. I’m going to be so happy about it. So that kind of work is bringing me joy?

Krystal Lee  03:32

I’m gonna toss it to Cody.

Cody Cotton  03:34

All right. I appreciate that. What is bringing me joy right now probably be my baby girl. So I have two boys, Caiel and Cymba, and my baby girl is five months old, CoriRose, and it just has been an amazing experience. The first three months, she would not let me hold her or anyone else but Mommy. I came back from our DC trip together, gathering, actually on Caiel’s birthday, and the day I came back, she was so happy to see me, big smiles. And from that point on, like we’re locked in, we’re forever now. Girl Dad! Yes, just made five months. Just made five months. So that is what’s quietly bringing me Yeah, that’s quietly bringing me joy, and loudly bringing me joy. A’ight, Robin, throwing it your way.

J. Robin Moon 04:35

Um, as you all know that I’ve been baking sourdough bread for quite some time, and I grew, I created my sourdough starter. And it was just very bravado, like, I’m gonna just create something, create a sourdough starter, and it was a little hard. And eventually I grew it. And you all helped me name it using the AI. Its name is Luna Rise. Guys for the audience. My last name is Moon, so that’s how we’re related.

J. Robin Moon 05:13

Gifting food is my thing, you know, wherever I travel, and also baking to gift is also something I’ve been doing just recently. I started, I know Baker friends, and I actually my, literally my banker who helps me with my money. He said he would like to learn how to start, you know how to bake, but I mean, he’s baked other things with us out. So I shared my Luna Rise with like, all kinds of instruction. And the other friend is a baker, but he’s done sourdoughs [but his starter] died, so I gave mine, and it just, it keeps on growing. You know, I feed it and I can, you know, it’s literally a gift that keeps on going. And that friend sent me photos two days ago of his bread that he, you know, baked using my Luna Rise. Yeah, it’s, it’s just a great gift to feed people in more ways than one. Well,

Mandy LeBreche  07:01

what’s quietly bringing me joy, because I kind of forget about it, is I revived my interest in gardening a little bit and growing some veggies. I get really into, like the prep and like planting them, and then for a few weeks, I’m into watering them. And then I kind of forget about it. So that’s why it’s a little quiet. But now, now the fruit is starting to come, and so there’s a lot of lettuce, all different kinds of tomatoes, and then some stuff maybe isn’t doing as well as I hope for, but I haven’t done it in a few years, so it feels fun to do it again. And, yeah, the kids, especially my youngest, get really excited to, like, you know, pick the cherry tomatoes from their backyard.

Krystal Lee  08:26

so season two, of Promising Practices for Health Equity. I’m super excited for this season because, as you know, this season features the IRL teams, the experience of the IRL teams and promising practices that they have either used in their projects or that have emerged from their projects, or some combination of the two. So yeah, I’m super excited to hear their stories, but I wonder why. Why do you think that it is critical for us to center the voices of the teams, as opposed to the outcomes of their work in our conversations about health equity?

Cody Cotton  09:14

I mean, I would love to start off. I think it’s really awesome to see how we’re able to shape and build the curriculum, the program in general, but it’s one thing to give them a space to show what they experience, what they learn, and what they took away from.

Mandy LeBreche  09:33

Yeah, it’s a long time that cohorts are with us, three years, two and a half to three years. So I think there’s so much learning and evolving that happens, even from what they had planned and proposed to us, in terms of what actually plays out. And I think you know for the impact, there’s other things you can go to to find out. But. Yeah, and I think so many teams had to make pivots during COVID that it’s, it’s fun to be able to learn about that. And, you know, see different tools that they used along the way.

Cody Cotton  10:15

Love that I was even thinking, the same team that entered into the program. It’s not the same that left. Mm, hmm, so much growth happened in between that

Krystal Lee  10:24

We have such a wide geographic diversity of teams too, to see how teams that are focused on particular themes, how they executed their projects, and what their experience was of that execution across the country, I think will be interesting,

J. Robin Moon 10:45

And to take even one step further back, this is this podcast in and of itself. It’s our National Program Center dissemination product to amplify our fellows’ work. So of the three seasons. Season two is the entree. It is the main entree, main dish. And I think that, you know, the audience might have heard this theme throughout the season one episodes. We started out with, you know, certain intention and aspiration and the best way that we knew at that time how to build leadership that has evolved quite a bit, and we, I think, are moving from, we have moved from giving voice to somebody who doesn’t have a voice, to actually amplifying the voice that existed, that that wasn’t being heard. I think there’s a big difference in that. And we are not talking only about successful, defined success, defined by sanitized metrics and evidence based, but really the process, the reality, how this really, actually happens, and not everybody or every research grant program might be talking about, that’s what we want to elevate. So that’s the entire reason for being in my mind this season.

Cody Cotton  12:20

I love that. I feel like I keep having a lot to say, but I think about Luis Ortega and Storytellers for Change, and he taught us so much, right, not just staff, but he taught so many of the fellows. So we get a chance to see that narrative play out over the podcast, and to see the impact he had, again, not just over us, but the fellows and the IRL program, just in general. So, I’m really looking forward to that.

Krystal Lee  12:47

I think there are a lot of lessons and takeaways I think that can be done from research that is quantitative and numbers kind of positivist focus, but I have found that the things that have been most impactful to me have been qualitative, qualitative projects, where you get to hear from people and so you know, as it relates to the practice of health, equity, right, behaving as if we are already in a space where health equity is the norm to the point of emergent strategies. By adrienne maree brown, I think it’s helpful for us to talk more about this work that we are doing and how we do it, and the experience of doing that work, and the lessons that are learned so that others can take what we have done and move it forward. And I think that the numbers are fine and rich and necessary, and I think the stories are impactful in a different way. And I think I feel a responsibility to Robin’s point to highlight and amplify those stories, and so this podcast, season two, is our attempt at doing that.

J. Robin Moon 14:12

You will also hear from some of the episodes in season two that certain teams started out with certain goals and objectives and things did not work out the way they thought they would. Does that mean it’s a failure? No, far from it. It went somewhere else, and we have all together learned how to pivot in that way. In this case, it’s actually about the final result, outcome, not metrics, but outcome in that we learn to pivot, and then we are okay with what we experience, and then we made that our promise, promising practice. So I want the audience to hear that as well.

Cody Cotton  15:00

Something that both you all said, You all both spoke to the diversity of the teams. And I know I didn’t want to throw it back on you, but I feel like we all could share some of the places that we have our teams from, even from just over the map, right? So I know one of the first ones that come to mind for me, maybe because I just want to go so bad, but Hawaii, right? I’m looking forward to all the stories and things are going to be shared.

J. Robin Moon 15:29

Hawaii, North Port Saint Joe, Florida. We have Boston, North Carolina, we have Atlanta. We have Kansas City. We have Louisiana, New Orleans, Louisiana. We have Alaska. We have Iowa.

Krystal Lee  16:08

Super Duper looking forward to talking with all of these lovely folks about their the experiences of their IRL projects, and importantly, what are the promising practices that they implemented in their projects and or what are the promising practices that emerged from their projects. And so we’ll hear about policies, practices, research approaches, community engagement, how they did that, community engagement, communication, and so on. So it’s a lot to it’s going to be I think it’s going to be great, and I would love for you all to be with us along the journey.

Tell us what is your hope for season two by painting us a picture of its impact. I can start to model. So my vision for the season two episodes is that I imagine that folks will listen to the episodes, they will hear something maybe that they’ve never heard of, or that they’ve heard of, but hasn’t they’ve never thought about applying it to research, to their research, to their work for health equity, and that they will take a look at what it involves, and potentially think about how they can apply it to their work. Apply one of these promising practices to their work. So I imagine somebody listening, hearing about something you know, going to some search engine and Googling, going to a search engine and searching for the concepts that they learned about and, you know, take a look at how they can talk more about it, or incorporate it into the work that they are doing. That’s kind of how I envision Season Two.

Mandy LeBreche  18:57

I think that, I hope that that season two will just open up new possibilities for people. I can imagine, I’m not a researcher myself, but I can imagine that at times it can seem maybe kind of isolating, like you’re confined to doing certain methods and just doing certain research tasks along the way, and I can imagine that all of our teams and fellows along the way had to make a lot of changes, and that the road was not Linear, and so I hope, by fellows and teams sharing about their process, that it can just open up new opportunities and possibilities for other people doing research to think about

Cody Cotton  19:56

I love that I’m going to speak on the other side of it, too. Because again, we hope so many people listen to it and they have aha moment. But I’m also thinking about the people who may not be researchers like you mentioned, who may see like, oh, okay, I can add value to that research team, whether you’re in community or or anything else, right? I’m just saying that this could be opportunity someone can hear it and discover what a fellowship is. Discover what does it mean to be in public health. There’s so many different ways to be in public health. So I’m also just thinking this could be a great learning opportunity and exposure, more than anything.

J. Robin Moon 20:39

I envision this season to encourage the audience out there to recognize the criticality of the process of this work in defining what community engaged research is, and honor the process. I also imagine that this season will help folks redefine what we mean by impact, impact of a certain research. What do we actually mean by that, impacting whom, impacting what and impacting what part of the research. Lastly, I imagine our season two will inspire other researchers and community leaders and those who are committed to community engaged research work, to learn, to be vulnerable. I assure you, the episode you will hear will not be about things that you can read in peer reviewed journal articles. It’s going to be very human, and it’s going to be very honest and open, and that we believe at IRL, that vulnerability, that taking chances to, you know, trust the community, changes everything. And I believe that it’s going to be reflected in all the episodes you will hear.

Cody Cotton  22:18

Well said

Krystal Lee  22:21

To that point, something else that occurs to me is I, I hope that maybe this podcast, these episodes in season two, can help communities learn how to effectively engage with research in ways that serve serve them, serve them, like insisting that the research that is done in their spaces answers questions that are important to them, that they build additional awareness of how that can be done through hearing about how IRL teams have done that work, and just to you know, build capacity for everybody who is engaged in community engaged research is what I hope comes out of season two. So thanks for that, y’all. So let’s wrap it up with our traditional last question, which is a checkout question and which is the question is, what is in one word? What is your intention for season two? I’ll start my word is, I’m going to say hyphenated, even though it’s not, it’s “capacity-building”. That’s what I hope this season achieves. I’ll toss it to you, Mandy,

Mandy LeBreche  23:51

Alright, I hope season two of the podcast inspires our listeners and viewers to think about things differently when it comes to community engaged research, partnerships, Just whatever…

Cody Cotton  24:13

expansion

J. Robin Moon 24:17

Ubuntu I am, because you are.

Krystal Lee  24:59

Thank you all for being with us today, and thank you to our listeners, as always, we want this to be a two way conversation, and we love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we’ll post our show notes and any resources that we discuss in this and other episodes, and don’t forget to subscribe to promising practices for health equity so that you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us, and remember, we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world until next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Season 1 Recap Roundtable

Season 1, Episode 8 | July 31, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee, J. Robin Moon, Cody Cotton, and Mandy LaBreche

Mandy LaBreche  00:03

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:19

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the interdisciplinary research Leaders program where we explore innovative and actionable strategies to meaningfully advance health equity. I’m your host, Krystal Lee, and I am joined by my phenomenal colleagues and co-hosts J. Robin moon, Mandy labresch and Cody Cotton, Hey, friends!

Co-hosts 00:42

Hey, Krystal. Hey!

Krystal Lee  00:45

This episode is a little different than the others. The four of us are going to have a conversation and take stock of what we’ve learned from the conversations we’ve had with our guests, and reflect on some of the transformative ideas that they have shared with us and the promising practices that can inform our collective work towards health equity. But before we jump in, I want to check in with you all, as is our habit. So tell me what it is that gives you energy these days.

I’ll start… I have been spending a lot of time in my garden. Summer is a kind of a light, lighter workload time for me, usually. And so I set up my garden pretty intensely, this year. I’m growing asparagus. There are five asparagus growing up in my garden. And also, I have a project, a furniture refinishing project that’s waiting for me when I get back home, I literally dream about it. So like, oh, what’s the best stripper to use on this furniture? That’s literally what I dream about. Yeah. So that’s giving me a lot of energy. I’m gonna kick it to Cody.

Cody Cotton  01:57

Alright. Appreciate that very much. So I am so used to seeing my kids give me energy, which is true. Anytime I see my baby boys in the morning, as well as the newborn baby girl, it gives me a lot of energy. But as of late, I am getting prepared for Chicago marathon. First one, October, 12. Week four of training, and my days run much smoother, and I feel much more energized after I get done running. So running has been giving me energy. Alright? Popcorn over to Robin.

J. Robin Moon 02:32

Thank you, Cody. I have instituted this morning routine. Well, I’ve had morning routines, and then I added something very small, I thought, is to literally write down my intention for the day. And I have this app that I have a widget on my phone. So every time I open my phone, I look at it. Boy, I didn’t see that power really impacting me. I didn’t see that coming. I think it’s really literally changing the way my brain starts firing in the morning. So that has been a great habit. I recommend it to you highly.

Cody Cotton  03:05

It’s amazing.

Mandy LaBreche:

What’s the app?

J. Robin Moon 03:09

It’s Insight Timer. There are a number of apps I use, but this is the only app that has that function. So you basically open the app every morning and write a very simple intention. In the first couple days, I’m like, Oh, I will be present. I will be mindful. And then I really got into it. So I’m a lot more specific now, and it really has been powerful.

Mandy  03:35

And it keeps a log of all your… so you can, like, scroll back and see why you’re putting in the early days of your intentions. Cool!

Cody Cotton  03:43

I think I know our checking question for next time has to be, what is our intentions for the week and for the day? That’ll be amazing. Shout out to you, Robin, thank you.

Mandy LaBreche  03:52

Okay, what gives us energy? I would say my kids, well, kind of a double edged sword. With kids, they give me a lot of energy, and they also, like, you know, manage to drain the energy a little bit depending on the day or the hour. But specifically, lately I’m like my daughter, it’s her first time playing, like, club soccer, so she’s always on like, rack level, so she boosted it up a little bit. And so it’s my first time not coaching her, because they have, like, legit, paid coaching staff. And so I get so energized, like, I’m like, a psycho mom at the game I get I get beyond energized, so into it, like, into every little detail. She had a game last night that I had to miss, but I made her FaceTime me, like, immediately after, and then the parents, like, group chat was like, sending me some updates. And yeah, typically, every season I do post a video of, like, my kids doing something. And like, yeah. So sometimes it’s that soccer and me just like, going absolutely crazy. Like, I think one time I even, like, got so excited I, like, threw the phone, one time I got all this energy. It was literally my daughter was in first grade, and they do these field games at the end of the year, and it was tug of war with the other first grade class. And like, I was so fired up for this. Like, it’s the truth. The video is the true sounds of like a psycho mom but like, we love it in a good way, in a good way, like psycho energy, if that’s possible. So lately, that’s what I’m getting energy from. I don’t think they’ll like it as they get older, but I can’t help myself.

Krystal Lee  05:44

Yeah, it’ll be embarrassing, but it’ll be it’ll become meaningful over over time, probably when you’re when they’re older. They’ll be like “My mom was 100% behind everything I did and that means something to me.

Mandy LaBreche

Okay, I hope so.

Krystal Lee  06:03

Yeah, man, a 12 year old is not going to be able to acknowledge that, but a 23 year old probably will. So one of these days. So thanks for checking in, friends. Let’s jump right into it like what let’s talk about, share some of our general reflections on the conversations that we’ve had this season. What are some things that have stuck out to you that have come up in our conversations with folks about Promising Practices for Health Equity?

J. Robin Moon 06:30

I’m gonna start with the general reflection, not necessarily about the conversation first. For the audience, this is our first time ever trying to make podcasts. I didn’t even used to listen to podcasts until we started this. And the season one happened, and we are wrapping season one, which is amazing to me. And we went with, like the one common goal, which is to share with our world what we’ve been doing. And you know, it wasn’t about my voice, quality of my voice, or the questions, but then it just happened. So I just marvel at how we actually made it happen. Kudos to you all.

Krystal Lee  07:12

Oh, same to y’all. Y’all know, I’ve wanted to be a podcast so far, very good for a very long time, like she’s been dreaming. Oh my gosh, I dreaming about it and and it has. I’ve always thought that it like podcasting was a good way to share information. Like, why don’t we do more of this, you know? But it’s actually a lot of work, and that’s a lesson. I figured it would be work, but I didn’t realize, like, how detail oriented you have to be to do a good job, to do justice to to what it is that you’re that you’re that we’re trying to communicate, and so generally, from the process, I’ve enjoyed every bit of it. I love working with you guys. I love talking to you guys. You know this, and I think we have a good thing that we started here, and we’ve already been getting some good feedback. I’m so glad what I know how to do is talk. That’s what I can do. Yeah, what about you, Cody?

Cody Cotton  08:04

I love that. Well, I have to answer the question different, right? Just because when you talk about just the preparation of being able to do a podcast, there’s a lot that you can learn from it, just in the prep of it, right? The launch of it, getting things organized often, is also telling when you do the prep interviews, whether you’re going over some things with each person, or even having a focus or the intentions of what we want to aim. I think it’s really unique to just hear the different perspectives of even the journey of not just IRL, but just even their experience.

Krystal Lee  08:37

What about you, Mandy?

Mandy LaBreche  08:39

Yeah, I feel like it’s kind of like a really full circle type of moment for me, I’m a listener of podcasts, but never had aspirations and dreams like Krystal to host a podcast. I still question myself a little bit, especially listening to the playback, but yeah, I love the process. And you know, as we’re in our final year of IRL, it’s been really fun just to have time and space, just to reflect with people. And, you know, there’s some people I haven’t seen and or talked to, really, in many, many years. So it’s been fun to be able to invite back, kind of the OGs of IRL. Yeah, it’s been great.

J. Robin Moon 09:19

If I can add one more thing before we move on to the next topic, I think that to your point. Mandy, like you say you, you are still skeptical of it like I think that all of you sound amazing. And for me to even be in this band, to do this together, is a symbol, symbolism of where we are as IRL and we all know, I mean, this is one of the premises of this podcast, which is that we start transforming ourselves, individually from within, before we transform our community. I used to some of you know this. I used to not be able to hear my own voice. I just couldn’t and it sounded hideous, and I sound awful. I think we, you all say, like to an extent, you know, similar things. But then we did it together as a community, and it came out to be a product that we are sharing with the world, so that, as a deliverable, the output, in and of itself, to me, is a symbol and success of our work in IRL.

Cody Cotton  10:26

I love that, and I have to speak to that too, because I think as we are helping our fellows within this leadership fellowship come up with their dissemination product, it’s like us as leadership get a chance to really go through that process even more in the fine tune process and disseminate your podcast, I was really telltale.

Krystal Lee  10:45

I want to lean into something that you started talking about, which is the community aspect of this, right the the building, creating a space where we feel supported, where we can do things that are hard and, you know, do hard things and feel supported as we explore that. And I wonder if you are able to, if anybody wants to talk, speak to the impact of the IRL community on our work towards health equity, on our collective work towards health equity. Is there anything that came up in the conversations that we had with folks around the importance of community as a promising practice?

J. Robin Moon 11:30

That’s another, like a meta kind of, I think, outcome of all the work, from what I’ve heard from all the episodes, I knew that we were not going to talk about the technical details or nitty gritty of research, but literally nobody said not once methodology or research anything. Every episode ended with the word “trust”. You’re talking about how we move at the speed of trust. It’s about, you know, building trust without it, you know, we can’t get this work done. So that, I think if there’s, like, a few big messages we want to send to the world of our work as a promising practice, before getting into details of any like on the ground work, is that I think. Trust, without trust, you can do nothing. And it’s a trust within the community that we exist for.

Mandy LaBreche  12:31

I love how every episode, like, just the themes of, like, being in community with one another, being connected to one another, like, you know, throw all the research aside at the end of the day, it really just seems like it’s about being connected to others, to be able to do this work, and if any part of that’s fragmented. I mean, I just feel like everything is paused, delayed, doesn’t move forward in the ways that you think it will and so I love that those themes are kind of interwoven in every episode, almost no matter who we’re talking to. It was about collaboration. It was about connecting with others. It was about relationships above all else. And I think, I mean, I don’t know, I wasn’t part of the group that developed IRL, but I can’t imagine that their conversations when they were developing this thing were around relationships and how are people going to be able to collaborate with one another? How are they going to be able to maintain and strengthen these three person relationships to do all this incredible work in the community I don’t like, I would bet that was barely talked about. And now we’re almost at the end of 10 years of IRL, and that’s the core foundation of what everyone is taking away from this program, which I think is amazing.

Cody Cotton  13:56

Yeah. And again, not to add much to it, you all said amazing things. I just want to put the emphasis on relationship. We learned through our work with Ashley that much work and more impact cannot be done without relationship, whether it’s in community work, research, whether it’s in working with the staff or even within the fellows, but relationship is at the center of all things.

J. Robin Moon 14:18

Ashley Ellis from Breathe Circle, what did she say that there is no accountability without relationship?

Krystal Lee  14:28

Yep, I think from my perspective, I’ve certainly seen, I’ve been with the program four years, and in that time, I’ve seen, I mean, so much change and evolution take place, especially around or or, you know, building our network and our community, our beloved community, as we, as we refer to it, and I think that there are traditional research models don’t usually take that into account. Even our community based research models don’t usually take that into account. I. And I think a promising practice that comes from that I would be like to have folks who are engaged in all research, but certainly community based research projects, to think about how you build relationships, how you build accountability through relationships, how you build trust with people, so that we can avoid, kind of the you know, go in, get what I need, leave extractive type approaches to research, which have been so detrimental to communities over time. And I think that’s something that we’ve talked about. I think Kathleen, in the episode with Kathleen she talked with Miss Bob-e and Cody and Robin about her experience doing community based research and how things have changed, and the importance of focusing on relationship building, trust and community with people in order to get the work done. And I think if we’re going to say we’re our equity is our purpose, equity is about people, right? And so we do have to prioritize being people centered. And that’s not just about the folks who we are doing research with, right? It’s important that we do research with people, not on people are about people, but also for ourselves, right? And practice what we preach, type thing.

J. Robin Moon 16:23

And to use Luis’s language, Luis Ortega, this importance of relationship, might be a concealed story. If the stock stories include researchers come swoop in and do the helicopter research. That is true, often cases. But what we don’t talk about enough is this beauty of relationship that is the main ingredient of any well done, action oriented community engaged research. I don’t think I’ve heard this before. We actually got to dig it out ourselves.

Krystal Lee  17:01

Thanks for sharing that reflection. So I’ll just share one of the one of the promising practices that really stood out for me is around well, two things embodying the future that we want to see. Adrienne Maree Brown, in her book emergent strategies, talks about this embodiment, like emergent strategies, being about like creating the world we want to see, and being who, being the people that can make that world possible. And I think IRL did some of that in its at its inception, by prioritizing community partnerships and but I wonder if there, if you all have thoughts about how that has happened in IRL over time, and what the evolution of that process and the work that the teams are doing together, researchers and community partners, how has the evolution of that been in line with us, embodying the futures that we want to see.

J. Robin Moon 18:05

I will throw out the first thought that I have, and this really has almost everything to do with the restorative practice, restorative justice work that we’ve been doing as a team to normalize conflict. That’s another concealed story. Maybe we have a we, as in a greater research community, or even just community community, we have a tendency of talking about all the things at the end, like that the end, as opposed to the process. And as part of the process, there are conflicts. How could we not? There are disagreements, and the challenge, the learning here is to navigate all of that, acknowledging it and then navigating it, not concealing it. So embodying the future we want to see, as we have seen with our fellows and with our team, ourselves, is to do that, to normalize conflict. It is bound to happen. The challenge is how we deal with it, and I think that we have been learning how to deal with it with grace and with I’m going to [say] love and acceptance. Why did I just hesitate? Because that’s like, such a soft word we say, but that’s the most powerful. I mean, love is the answer to everything, and I think that’s what we’ve been learning.

Cody Cotton  19:27

Yeah, that resonated. I feel like I’m saying the same thing closely within relationship, but it’s so important. I remember something Ashley taught us that you’re less likely to harm people that you know, right, and people like, well, I harm people I know all the time, but when we say no, I just know their name, where they’re from, but truly like their values and principles and the morals that they stand by. Or when we come together in a room, when we talk about community agreements, what resonates for you? what is that community agreement mean for you, while thinking about the body embodiment of the future? That we want to see, we want to bring about. It truly starts with relationships and with everything that we’re doing, even when you’re talking about the restorative practices. Yes, conflict is normal. We know we’re going to have conflict, but if you build a relationship before the conflict, you can easily restore the harm. That’s right? The issue is when there’s a conflict and then you don’t have a relationship, any base or any foundation to build on, then you have a situation. Incidents happen when we see what we see often have happened with teams falling out, but it’s because they haven’t built anything foundational. The only thing that’s been foundational has just been a project they chose to come together on.

Krystal Lee  20:36

That’s exactly right. Thank you. That’s Thank you for saying that. Yeah, I like that? Yeah, well said. I think that the what an important practice that we could also, that we could take away, is the creation of community agreements, right? But, but with intention, because it’s not enough to just write down some agreements and just to have said that, just to be able to say that we [what does it mean to you?] What does it mean to me? Why am I doing this? How am I going to be remain connected to it. Are we going to keep like we’ll review it every few months or every year or something, because that kind of like your to your point, sets the groundwork for how we manage things that are going to that are going to happen. When you have people working together, there will be conflict. And of course, there’s a scale of conflict, right? So it doesn’t necessarily have to be something like super disruptive, but conflict is going to happen, and what is the foundation upon which we are navigating this conflict? If we have set already our priorities as a group and we this is something that we can come back to. It makes it easier to navigate what is happening. One to maintain the relationship, to to restore harm that has been done, to be able to communicate that harm has been done, to identify what the needs are, that is that are going unmet, that’s causing the harm, right? But then also to be able to manage that the tension that comes from that conflict in a way that’s generative instead of destructive, there is a there is a way for us to do work with people where conflict is inherent and sometimes unseen. You don’t know where it’s going to come from, like some things that are completely unexpected, but we have this foundation upon which, this relationship that we built, this trust that we’ve built together, and these agreements that we have made together, that we all take seriously, that is going to guide us as we navigate this conflict. So there’s no reason to avoid conflict if we have established like we’ve set ourselves up for success in advance.

Cody Cotton  22:35

Yeah, and just when you were speaking, I just thought about it, because whether you say when you bring people together, conflict is naturally going to happen, right? It’s inevitable. But when you look at community and researchers and bringing community and researchers together, there are certain community agreements that you might say a word, and they see it two different ways. Community look at the word community different, as well as research, the word research different, and vice versa. And it’s like when you don’t have that opportunity to really come together and say, What do you mean by community engaged research? We have two different definitions of community engaged research, yeah, that could at least be more preventative for some of the harm that could be caused as well.

Krystal Lee  23:16

The work that we have been doing around restorative practices, right, there are elements that you work on consistently before there is even a conflict, right? Building relationships, getting to know each other, checking in, like making creating authentic kind of relationships be learning to be your authentic self with others, and that sets you up for success when there is a conflict, because I know you right in I know that maybe you said something and I think it’s out of pocket, but I can think twice. I can give you the benefit of the doubt, because that’s not really like that’s not really like him, and that’s not what I would have expected from him. Let me instead of like, going crazy right away, getting in my feelings about what you said, there has been space created for me to address, address the thing that landed with me in a certain way. There’s a way for us to address that, a foundation upon which we can address that, because the work has been done in advance. Also restorative justice allow restorative practices allow us like tools and a pathway for having conversations that are intended to restore relationships, to reintegrate people into groups and community and to address harm that has been caused. So it’s work on both sides of the conflict, yeah, work that has to be continuously. We have to continuously tend to these relationships. And I think restorative practices gives us a good blueprint for some of that work.

Cody Cotton  24:51

Yeah, amazing for – that work.

J. Robin Moon 24:52

Preach it.

Mandy LaBreche  24:55

Yeah, I’m so glad you talked about that, because before I really started to learn about restorative justice work…. So two years ago, a short journey so far, like I was always thinking the restorative justice work came in when there was a conflict, and then very quickly, learned from Ashley Ellis, of Breathe Collective and others, that it’s about doing the work in advance to prepare you to have success when you do when there is a conflict. So it’s always about being in relationship with folks and having that be the foundation.

Cody Cotton  25:30

And I think that’s a stock narrative, a stock story, right? So many people think that, right? RJ or restorative practices becomes priority when there’s a conflict, yeah, like you just said, Ashley taught us that, no… before anything. That’s just a way of life, that’s just the way we move inside the circle. Outside the circle, it’s about building relationship, but that’s what it means to be human.

25:56

Say that

J. Robin Moon 26:00

None of these were part of, say, call for applications, or, you know, research protocols, what makes a research rigorous? None of this was included. I’ve not learned any of this. I’ve gone to a few schools in my life. I have never learned these things in school, especially in higher education, so that, I mean, that’s something to think about. Why don’t we? Because apparently this is the most important thing, and we’re all missing this training. Is what I learned. I think for me anyway, in the last years of IRL.

Krystal Lee  26:43

No, I mean, I’ve had the benefit of lots of good teachers around this stuff, not necessarily in school, but just people in my life who have, I’ve learned the importance of being well with myself, but also with others and in relationship and community with others. And this has the work that I’ve done with IRL these last few years have just added to that. So I consider myself to be very lucky to be in this space with y’all learning about this stuff. So thank you all for sharing.

I’m going to ask you to dream with me for a second. Alright, so put on your dreaming caps, or your little like sleep masks and when, if you imagine seven generations down the road, right, what stories do you hope that they will tell about this moment in our work towards health equity, I can start, I hope that this moment is just a pivot point. I hope that it is just a bend in the road. I hope that the difficulties that we are currently navigating are actually prompts that help us to do things differently and better for people and communities and relationships. I hope that they see us as… I hope that they see that we are learning and that we are trying our best to create a world where everybody can have what they need, and we can take care of each other, take care of ourselves, take care of the environment, that we can live balanced lives. I hope that that’s where we are, that where we are going, Yeah, and I hope that they will see, you know, conversations like this, programs like IRL, tools like restorative justice and storytelling and prioritizing self care and all of these things that have been identified as promising practices, I hope that they are built in… to seven generations from now, that these are things that that folks just do without having to think about it, and it’s just natural for them.

J. Robin Moon 28:57

Along with that, I would add that these things we just talked about how these things are not taught in school. I hope that this will be part of the core teachings in higher education, higher institutions. There will be leadership development programs and grant programs that focus on this first and foremost, before we do any public health or epidemiology, social epidemiology research.

Cody Cotton  29:29

To speak on that. I think it would be amazing, especially when I envision generations down the line, is that we truly change the norm of dissemination. We make health equity a normal topic within family households. Conversations about not just health equity, but anything that could be new found information that was brought by research. We’ve put it together in such a way that by disseminating it, it just becomes a family norm. It’s more often spoke about not just in universities, but even within communities.

J. Robin Moon 30:05

The kids would know what health equity means, yeah, for example, yeah.

Mandy LaBreche  30:15

They would learn about restorative justice practices. I think I’m thinking of it a little bit similar to you Krystal like, I hope future generations can, like, look back and learn about this moment as like, something that’s transformative and something that like people can be… I don’t know that collectively, we can package up all of our emotions about what’s going on right now and like, use it for good. And like, actually permanently change things, and, you know, pave a new path towards how we get to a more equitable world. And, yeah, I hope it can be a real turning point for future generations, looking back at 2025.

Krystal Lee  31:02

So the last question that I want to ask, which is going to be our wrap up question. So we’ve dreamed a little bit about what we want the future to look like, right? And so I want you to ask you to think about, how are you going to transform yourselves so that we can transform the world? So what is it? What promising practice are you going to implement in your lives, personal lives, professional lives? What’s one thing that you are going to try to do as a promising practice, to promote your own work towards health equity?

Cody Cotton  31:37

Mine is very short. It’s less thinking, more action

J. Robin Moon 31:41

To be the change that I want to see in this world.

Krystal Lee  31:45

Yeah, I’m going to be an example of self care. So that’s because I think that self care is necessary to promote sustainable movements towards equity, to reference Shawn Ginwright’s work in the Four Pivots.

Mandy LaBreche  32:03

I think so many people talked about this in the checkout question that was around self care, and it’s something that I don’t do, but a lot of people did talk about setting intentions and also meditation, and I think that’s something that I could definitely benefit from, I feel like I’m typically, like resistant to sitting with my thoughts, like I’ll distract myself out of just sitting with my own thoughts. And so I think that’s something that could just help me find a greater balance day to day.

Speaker 2  32:41

You can meditate while playing pickleball. You can it’s moving meditation…

J. Robin Moon 32:53

but like you are breathing, I promise you pickleball. You’re thinking about pickleball only. You’re not supposed to be thinking about meditation, so you are meditating, I promise you.

Cody Cotton  33:05

from the yogi herself, okay.

Krystal Lee  33:15

So thank you all for having this conversation with together today. As always, we want this to be a two way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you, our listeners. Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we will post our show notes and links to any resources that we discussed in this episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, thanks again for joining us, and remember we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time.

Mandy LaBreche  34:02

Promise, Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

People, Place, and Purpose: Reimagining Health Equity with IRL

Season 1, Episode 7 | July 17, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee and J. Robin Moon
• Guests: Andriana Abariotes and Bonnie Clarkston

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity  podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research LeadersProgram, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:21

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity , the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m Krystal Lee, and today my co host is the incomparable J Robin. Moon, hey Robin.

J. Robin Moon 00:36

Hi Krystal.

Krystal Lee  00:39

Robin, I’m so excited today to have Bonnie and Andriana Abariotes with us today. Welcome Bonnie and Andriana.

Andriana  00:48

Thank you.

Bonnie

Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Krystal Lee  00:52

Bonnie. Can you start off by just introducing yourself briefly and telling us about how your professional journey brought you to IRL, and then we’ll kick it over to Andriana afterwards.

Bonnie Clarkston  01:04

Sure. So I am retired from Academy Health. I was a Vice President there, where I worked on a number of Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation grant programs, and I came to IRL. Gosh, I think it started in 2016 the University of Minnesota was looking for partner organizations to help support a new change leadership program being funded by RWJ, and they reached out to Academy Health, and we joined the team then, and have been with the IRL program ever since.

Krystal Lee  01:40

Thank you. Andriana, tell us about yourself and how you became associated with IRL.

Andriana Abariotes  01:46

Sure happy to. And since this was some time ago, from the very beginning, I’ll just give a little bit of background, maybe. So I was the Director of the Twin Cities program of LISC –  the Local Initiative Support Corporation, and LISC is a national community development intermediary, and we had been working alongside a number of health systems here in the Twin Cities region, including ALINA Health, which was kind of one of the very earliest anchor institution activities, where they were connecting community development and community health and health practice there. So in that role at LISC, we were an investor in a lot of the community work that was happening in and around the hospital system. And I had been part of the backyard initiative, which was driven by ALINA and Jen Malcolm, who was kind of an initial applicant, and then co director, she became our Minnesota Commissioner of Health shortly after that, but she and I had been working around that table, and the opportunity for IRL came together. And So she had invited both myself and LISC to be at the table as a community partner, both to leverage our national platform as well as kind of to go and do a deeper dive in the work that we were doing in community. And then, just by happenstance, LISC and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation were working alongside the Federal Reserve Bank to try to foster healthy communities conversations. It came at from two different directions, and it was perfect timing to think about how to leverage this opportunity.

J. Robin Moon 03:33

The earlier model of community leader of IRL, so it was really important background that you gave us. Thank you for that. So before we get started, we invite you to check in with us. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building the kinds of communities that collaborate effectively in the work toward health equity. So at the beginning of our meetings at IRL, most of the meetings, we do a quick check in to help us set the ground and continuously build connections in our team, our beloved community, as we call it. So here’s our check in question for today. If you could time travel in the US, which period or decade would you choose to visit first? So I thought about this a little bit because it’s my question, provided that I can come back to where I am, I would go back to the Roaring 20s, 1920s right after the influenza pandemic. I read relatively extensively about how all these great things happened. Things just flourished and bloomed after a horrible pandemic 100 years ago. And right now, I’m not really feeling like that is what’s happening. I would like to learn how it happened and what happened exactly so I can bring it back to today and apply. Okay, I’m going to toss it to you, Krystal.

Krystal Lee  05:02

I took this question a little bit differently. I think that I would go back to when indigenous people were in charge of the United States, known at the time as Turtle Island, and I would tell them not to be so nice to the visitors.

J. Robin Moon 05:24

the agent from the future.

Krystal Lee  05:26

Think about this. You need to be a lot careful. I think that’s what I would do. I’ll toss it to you. Bonnie,

Bonnie Clarkston  05:32

I took even a different approach to this question. So I would go back to a time before cell phones. I’ve been thinking a lot about family vacations, where my many nieces and nephews would play wiffle ball and we’d have big family dinners. And now to get them to look up from a cell phone is excruciating for them. I missed that time with more one-on-one communication.

Andriana Abariotes  06:04

I kind of went where Robin went a little bit, but for a different reason. So my grandfather immigrated to the United States right at the turn of the last century. So it’s hard math, but it works since my grandfather was 60 when my dad was born. So he was born in the late 1800s and immigrated in like 1910. And so I’m just curious about what that experience would have been like, coming to the United States, trying to become established. He sold candy at fruit stands, and then ultimately became a candy store owner over time. And it was like, that whole story. And so I think about the community development work that he was doing before it was actually named, it was like, I think that’s what’s in my blood, and I think that’s why I do the work that I do. So I would just wanted to see what that world would have been like for him and my kind of immediate ancestors.

J. Robin Moon 07:07

That was a really fun answers all of you. Thank you for sharing. Okay, now let’s talk about IRL. From your own perspective tell us what you remember about the original vision of IRL at the time of development. So, 2014-2015 well, because you were both involved from the beginning, relatively, what were your motivations and hopes for the program? Andriana, do you want to start?

Andriana Abariotes  07:37

Sure. So, as I had mentioned, I had been around the table at the backyard initiative with Jan Malcolm, who was one of the original co directors. And what was really interesting about what we were doing at the backyard initiative was this was after at least a decade of investment that the health system the city and the county had done together to improve the physical environment. So a lot of the neighborhood revitalization work in and around hospital institutions had everything to do with affordable housing and workforce development in other forms. And so then ALINA, in its next iteration, was doing this backyard initiative, and the community just completely revolted and said, “Hey, wait a minute, you’re in our backyard. Let’s try to have a different conversation around health.” And so we were working with an organization, very rooted community organization, called the Cultural Wellness Center, who was facilitating those conversations and really kind of turning the conversation around health on its on its head.  And I think it was a powerful example of when you engage community, and really take the time to listen and learn that there is a different way of getting to kind of answers in a community, solutions in a community. And so I think it was kind of from that table and that experience, it felt like the opportunity for IRL was perfect timing to be thinking about how communities could partner with researchers, whether they were university institutions or think tanks or folks who had the tools and the skills around using data and research and the exploration for the information that communities need, whether it’s from trying to get a great handle on a needs assessment to in a lot of cases, nonprofit organizations and communities have to deliver research on impact and evidence based practice and the like for resources. And so it was like, how could we really look. Bridge this opportunity to develop those relationships. And I think it was coming with that spirit and thinking about, how might we be able to inform the practice, not only for our own backyard, but for communities that were experiencing similar situations across the country.

J. Robin Moon 10:18

That’s fantastic. I started 2020 so often thinking about this program, initiated by a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that does a lot of research – the research part of the IRL tends to come out first as maybe the motivation or like the goals and objectives. But you totally gave me an entirely different orientation. Thank you for that. Bonnie, how about you the original vision of IRL and your motivation and hope for the program?

Bonnie Clarkston  10:45

Sure. So coming from Academy Health, which is the professional home for health services researchers, I thought a lot about what we do, what we did there, what currently goes on at Academy health. It’s a lot about translating evidence into action. And so when we were at that first meeting at RWJ, what I was thinking about was the fact that this was a different model. These were teams of researchers and community partners working together on community based projects, a little bit different than what I had seen in other RWJ grant programs, where you see typically researchers in an ivory tower crunching data. And so what we were asked to do was develop a curriculum focused on policy and communication training, and at the start, we had to think about, what does that mean when the research team is really embedded in a community and the team members are co-equal partners- researchers and community leaders. And I don’t know that I had an expectation at the time, but it was exciting to think about a new model of research.

Krystal Lee  12:02

Thank you for sharing all that context. It really helps me to – we had a conversation a couple weeks ago with Nancy Fishman from the Foundation, who was the program officer at the time, and we’re gathering as someone who started in 2021 like the program was well on its way. It’s really good to hear about how these different people from different walks of professional life and so on, how everybody came together to form this program and to do it in such a different way. So to see the evolution of how research happens in the community and as part of the community, how that has changed. So I wonder if you could also talk to us about – while you were with the program, how you saw the program itself evolve, and how this evolution of the program came about. Let’s start with Bonnie.

Bonnie Clarkston  12:53

It was interesting because there was definitely an evolution in the way that we conducted the policy and communication training, and really that was informed by the teams themselves. I think when we started again, we had that traditional research model in mind, and so we convened panels of very traditional federal policy makers. And as time went on, the teams were reminding us that it would be most helpful to hear from folks who better represented their communities and the work that they were doing. And so we expanded our meeting to include not only federal policy makers, but state and local policy makers, community stakeholders. We had a panel of journalists, terrific folks from a national newspaper, and realized that what we needed to do was broaden that to reporters who who worked at the local level, at the state level, and rather than just have panels where folks talked at the teams we had, we developed a program called small group discussions, where we brought in members of the community, folks from the community, working on projects similar to what our teams were working on, to have conversations and to talk about challenges, objectives and the work that the teams were doing. So it was an evolution in the way we structured the program to better meet the needs of the teams.

Krystal Lee  14:31

Andriana, in your time, how did you see the program evolve?

Andriana Abariotes  14:35

Well, I was and I really appreciate what Bonnie was saying, because I took a lot from those sessions. Those were great, right? Like, so I think both researchers and community partners got a lot out of the policy and communication, especially working with journalists. So I was thinking back to this. So IRL and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we were both building the plane as we were flying it, right? Like, so it really felt like it was quick to kind of stand up with some kind of core principles, values, what we call pillars, right? And it was great to go back and look and see, like, Oh, those are all still the same pillars. So those are, we were right in the beginning of thinking about what we’re going to be some of the biggest challenges. So thinking about collaboration and the tools for collaboration, and the practice of collaboration, and how hard it is, and we saw that play out multiple times in and amongst teams across the program. I think those were similar themes that were coming up in the other national programs that RWJ was supporting. The whole process of change leadership, I think was more of an intellectual exercise in the beginning, and it was like, no, there’s a lot of tools that I think even the researchers began to think about their own institutions as change management, right? I think there was a lot of let’s build a lot of skills, let’s do a lot of conversation and webinars and mini courses so that people had tools. And I would say that maybe over time, what really became most effective was creating space for adults to learn together, which is really a lot of peer to peer. It’s a lot of conversation. But as a program, when you’re really trying to entice people to make an investment of their time and effort, you want to make sure you’re like, providing value. So you can’t just say, Oh, well, we’re gonna have three years of open ended conversation, right? We had to have some structure to it. So I think the pillars that we kind of established around collaboration and community engagement, around the policy conversation, how to disseminate, and even having a research project, I think, very ambitious from the very, very beginning, maybe that has evolved over time, so that people just know how to work together, to ask the right questions, to understand community context, to embed health equity in the conversation, in a lot of ways, from those very early conversations. I don’t know if health equity was at on the list or at the table, but it became quickly evident that was an important piece that had to be quickly built and supported and understood that was going to be a key piece of the conversation to do this work.

J. Robin Moon 17:42

Andriana, you already got into the conversation the question I’m going to ask so we’ve heard from others so far through this podcast recording that there has been, there was an intentional prioritization of communities and community organizations, or even researchers from the academic institutions to think about how to orient communities in the center of their work through the IRL program. With the benefit of your experience at IRL and all your career, can you share with us how your concept of community engaged research might have evolved. So it’s a similar question from before, but drilling down specifically to community engaged research, what lessons have you learned about how to execute this well?

Andriana Abariotes  18:36

Well I think it’s always something that I’m learning, right? Like, I don’t think there’s an end point to it so, but I think as it’s evolved for me coming into the program, and just even my own experience, there were a lot, there were tensions. What it means to do community work, period, right? So I think on the one hand, kind of neighborhood and community population level, when we’re trying to think about population health, neighborhoods are great organizing kind of scales right to kind of go deeper into but, you know, a neighborhood isn’t necessarily the only way you define communities. I think there’s multiple communities inside communities, and so just really being able to kind of say, well, how are we defining community, and how do we wrestle with what that looks like from the research perspective, was something that was also a through line, I think, from those early days of IRL and probably continuing. When I think about community work, there’s a lot of ways that it can be structured as people oriented or place based, or somewhere in between, or some combination of those things. And so what? There’s a couple of different adages that I’ve heard for many, many years. It’s the “if it’s about us, but not with us, it’s not for us”, right? So like that, really what comes through with community engagement and Community engaged, community based, participatory research, for sure. But there’s also a tension kind of in community development work, where if you focus on people oriented strategies or interventions, oftentimes people improve their lives and move out of neighborhoods. Simultaneously, if you only focus on place based activities, you make investments and you force people out. And so it’s like holding that tension, I think, becomes both important from a community investment and Community Development kind of standpoint as well as a community research kind of perspective as well. And so I just I find that in all of that work for me, in my career, there’s an immediacy when working with community, whether you’re working individually. My most recent position was with a large scale nonprofit organization providing affordable housing and supportive housing being a key piece of that people are. It’s a day to day experience, and so the immediacy of even trying to engage residents or develop a resident survey is something that has to be so relevant in the moment and creating space where there’s you’re playing kind of a short game and a long game simultaneously. And so just thinking about, well, how does research then kind of intersect with that is, like a really interesting question that I don’t think I found a great answer for, but I definitely used a lot of the experience at IRL thinking about like, how do I guide evaluation work for this organization? How do I think about the infrastructure that’s needed for resident surveys or other kind of continued work? So I just hope that’s what a lot of the folks who were participating in IRL are taking with them, especially from a community partner standpoint, like, how do I think about that infrastructure and those relationships that kind of continue this work over time?

Krystal Lee  22:11

Thanks for that context. Andriana, several things that you said made me want to ask this question of Bonnie. So it’s about the ways that we communicate what we find in this research to try to get it back to the community that’s served as kind of the, however we’re defining community, right? That’s kind of served as the location for where this work happened. And I’m curious about whether or not like if, how much you can talk about the evolution of the ways that we communicated those results. So I know we started with research briefs being the primary means of gathering and sharing the information. But how has that changed over time?

Bonnie Clarkston  22:57

That’s a great question. It did change significantly, and picking up on some of Andriana’s points, we had to really think hard about the fact that these teams were in community. The community partner was so critical in terms of being oftentimes the better messenger when we wanted to share findings. And so, as you said, Krystal, we started with training on how to develop a research brief, but heard from the teams, and soon realized that is not an effective mode of communication for a lot of these teams who want to reach a school board or a tribal leader or a barber shop owner, and so we expanded the curriculum to include development of op eds or podcasts or PowerPoint decks, and brought in folks like Jonathan Schwabish at the Urban Institute to help train the teams on data visualization, because as we worked with the teams, we tried to really impress upon them that the work that they were doing was going to be most effective if it could be communicated to the right stakeholders using the right means. And we worked with them to develop social media platforms and asked them to really think hard about who their stakeholders are, and how best can you reach them.

Krystal Lee  24:30

Thanks for sharing that. Bonnie and I know that in the last year or two, that evolution has continued right to where we have offered even more opportunities or different ways of sharing our information, our findings from our research. So thank you for sharing that.

J. Robin Moon 24:45

Also, Andriana, the way that you put the tension between the people and place that is not something I like community development. You are the true community developer, and I have heard outside the public health context, that tension, and that’s that’s a big tension, and then great tension to think about and work with. But generally in the public health world, I find, at least from my world, people tend to be defined by their disease condition, disease state or health condition, and the place concept, the physical place based strategy and concept do not really get in the conversation. So that was a really great reminder. Thank you for that. We want to now ask you about promising practice. And this is not necessarily the best practice. This is not the “go big or go home” kind of practice. We want to hear from you looking back at the last 10 years of IRL while you were involved, and including the time you’re involved, what are you most proud of? Give us an example or two of Promising Practices for Health Equity that you want to share with our audience that they may go replicate somewhere else.

Bonnie Clarkston  26:00

The research teams would begin their time at IRL by developing their research plan. That was one of the early steps as they started their work. What we asked them to do is to simultaneously develop a dissemination plan right at the start of their work. Oftentimes, if you think about traditional research, a research team does a study three years goes by, and then they start thinking about which journal they’re going to publish in. That wasn’t going to work in this model. So we asked the teams to develop a research plan right at the start of their three year time with the program, and so that they could think about what, who their stakeholders were, how best to communicate with them, and have that top of mind throughout their entire project. And I think that in that way, they were able to connect with journalists, with policy makers, with other stakeholders throughout the process, develop those relationships and then effectively communicate the findings from the work that they were doing. So I think again, starting that dissemination plan at the start is a really great practice.

J. Robin Moon 27:15

And I totally agree. Andriana?

Andriana Abariotes  27:20

Yeah, I think there’s just a fundamental opportunity for relationships and building kind of the skill sets and the set of relationships that you need to do this work. And as I think about the community partner role in particular, there’s so much work that is always just right in the immediacy of like what’s right in front of me right now, right? And so the IRL experience, both in the local research opportunity and the broader programmatic and national conversations, just lifts you up out of that immediacy of that day to day, to be thinking differently, to be developing those relationships that to be thinking about policy work when so much of that might be immediate service delivery or some level of practice that just even than that, I don’t want to lose sight of just the value of the space And the opportunity is one of its most promising aspects. I do think, like the ability to be thinking about what’s the end to this conversation and the dissemination being an important piece of it. I think that beginning kind of river exercise, or that river of life exercise, where people really figure out how, what’s my tributary that kind of rolls into this broader movement, and so whether that’s for each individual team, or as the teams got to hear each other’s stories come together, and the cohorts that to me, was always something that I really looked forward to learning and seeing how people devise that element of the story and that and the collaboration.

Krystal Lee  29:07

Perfect. Thank you all so much for sharing. I think that one of the reasons that we wanted to do this podcast is to illuminate some of these practices so that others can think about how to do the work for health equity in ways that have been effective for us and may be effective for them. So thank you for highlighting those. One of the books that we’ve engaged within the program over the last couple of years has been emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown. And one of the things, one of the quotes from that book, that really sits with me is the fact that is adrienne maree brown says, All that you touch, you change, and all that you change changes you^[1]. So I want to invite you to share with us, what do you think that the impact of the IRL program has been on you, and how has your involvement with the program changed you?

Bonnie Clarkston  29:57

Hmmm… That’s great. You know, one of the things. Things that we talked a lot about with the teams was the value of storytelling. We would often say data makes you credible, stories make you memorable. And what has changed for me is really the impact that teams like IRL can have within a community. These teams were so passionate, and are so passionate about the work that they do and you don’t, you can have an impact that is so fundamental, and it was just amazing to me to watch the enthusiasm among the IRL teams for the work that they were doing.

Andriana Abariotes  30:46

Yeah, I think there were a couple of things. Part of it was just even having the experience of connecting with health. So whether it was healthcare practitioners or public health practitioners or folks who were talking about community health. For those of us who come from the community development realm, it was very easy to think about in physical capital and economic capital. And lot of the conversation early on that I mentioned [in] the beginning was that, like, how do we get healthcare investing in affordable housing and community development right? Like it was, development, right? Like it was a, it was almost a monetary kind of exploration, because the Affordable Care Act had passed, we were going to move from volume to value. And community developers were like, Hey, we’re ready to, like, help you with social determinants. And then a lot changed, but the challenge still remains. But I think understanding the importance of human and social capital, particularly the social capital, because that, to me, was a lot of the conversation around social isolation, around mental and behavioral health, and the intersection of when people and place based strategies, right? Like became this… IRL became this place where that meeting ground was happening. And so for me, that was always really powerful to see and to learn from. And not to say that we didn’t know human capital and social capital were important, but like, just how important and how to really leverage kind of those conversations and important ways to do, whether it’s community development and community building work or community research work, I think is really important.

J. Robin Moon 32:33

I just want to note that every episode of season one so far, we’re talking about a research program, not a word of method has been mentioned. It almost always ended with relationship and people and social capital, just noting that – it’s wonderful. It’s time to wrap up our conversation already, and we’re going to do a checkout together. So this is checkout question goes to all guests that we have for our podcast, which is the work to achieve health equity can be very draining to the point of being unsustainable. I think we all know that. Can each of you share the strategies that you use for yourself to find rest and engage in self care?

Bonnie Clarkston  33:17

I am a big proponent of walking, I find I do my best thinking when I walk, and it’s also a great way to relieve stress.

Andriana Abariotes  33:30

I was able to kind of build a meditation practice during all of this, and I think particularly when 2020 came around. So when I was co-director in 2020 a lot was going on, especially here in the Twin Cities. George Floyd was murdered. We were completing a selection process that week. And I think the level of trauma that was being experienced here, and across the country, certainly, but like just it was so intense trying to figure out how to navigate any and all of that and make sense of that. I think just being able to kind of step back in quiet and go to a place where meditation, like I think, was the only thing that helped me, walks were also good, and continue to be good, but like that, practice of mindfulness and meditation, I think is underrated, and I would encourage everyone to try it.

J. Robin Moon 34:31

Great. Thank you.

Krystal Lee  34:33

Thank you for sharing Bonnie and Andriana, and we’re so grateful for the time that you spent with us today, illuminating your experience with IRL and helping us to learn more about the program and how the program evolved over time.

We really appreciate your time, so thank you for joining us, and thank you to our listeners. As always, we want this to be a two way conversation, so we would love to hear from you. Please share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page where we will also be posting our show notes and any resources discussed in our episodes. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity  so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for joining us today, and remember we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time,

Mandy LeBreche  35:33

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners, for being a part of this important conversation.

^[1] This quote is originally attributed to Octavia Butler.

The Power of Shared Leadership in Research

Season 1, Episode 6 | July 3, 2025

• Hosted by:  Cody Cotton and J. Robin Moon
• Guests: Kathleen Call and Ms. Bob-e Simpson Epps

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the promising practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Cody Cotton  00:22

Hello, and welcome to promising practices for health equity. The podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m Cody cotton, sitting in for Krystal today, and my cohost is the illustrious J. Robin Moon. Hey, Robin!

J. Robin Moon

Hi Cody.

Cody Cotton

In our last episode, we talked with Nancy Fishman, former Program Officer for IRL. If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to go back and listen to Nancy’s episode. We talk about how IRL came about, the original vision for the program, and some of the lessons learned as the program evolved. Today we will examine the program from a different perspective. Our guests today are Dr. Kathleen Call and Miss Barbara Simpson Epps, also known as Miss Bob-e. Hello, Kathleen. Hello, Miss Bob-e. Thanks for being with us today.

Dr. Kathleen Call  01:19

Great to be here.

J. Robin Moon 01:21

Kathleen served for over nine years, from the beginning of IRL, as Associate Director for Community Engagement. And Miss Bob-e also has been with us from the very beginning, has been the senior advisor with us, and also led the Community Action Advisory Board, as in CAAB we say, since the since its inception in 2021 is that right, Miss Bob-e?

Barbara Simpson Epps  01:44

yes,

J. Robin Moon 01:47

We’re so happy to have you both here today. Before we get started, we want to invite you to just check in with us as you know – and we’ve been practicing together – one of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is key to building the kinds of communities that collaborate effectively in the work towards health equity. So at the beginning of our meetings, all our episodes, we do a quick check in to help us continuously build connections in our team – our beloved community. So here’s our check in for today? What is the one thing that makes you feel hopeful these days? It Feels like a particularly difficult question. At least for me, I will start – I have to think about this. I think about the five year anniversary of the pandemic. Five years ago now, we were in the very, very thick of it, and it feels like yesterday. And at the same time, it feels like 100 years ago. I think about how we actually made, I can’t believe, if I sit and think about it, I can’t believe we actually made it out of that, and this life saving vaccines and all kinds of innovations and as community, that we pulled together and that we’re here recording this podcast. So I am really grateful for that. And when I hit the lowest moment, which I did at the time, there will be there will be a tomorrow. And I think about it these days, every day, since the since about March, that that gives me hope. Can I toss it to you, Cody?

Cody Cotton  03:23

Please do. Please do. I had some time to think about it. I would have to say the youth – and that’s like two sided, right? So I often think about the kids and the students we work with here in Chicago with the youth mentorship. But it’s very easy for me just to look at my kids here at home. I was quick to say my boys, but it’s not my boys anymore. It’s my boys and my baby girl as well. So, the family brings me a lot of joy, a lot of hope. Yeah. So thank you. I’m gonna toss it to you, Kathleen.

Dr. Kathleen Call  03:57

Well, I’m gonna piggyback on your answer, Cody. So for me, when I want to feel hopeful and be reminded that there’s joy and a future that could be amazing for us, it’s really hard for me to get there, but I look at videos of my grandbaby, or I was at the March this past week, and there was this little girl on her dad’s shoulders holding her own sign, saying, “hands off my future”. And I’m thinking, Yes, you know, the next generations are going to save the world, crossing my fingers. So I would say it’s also youth and the joy that they bring and the positivity they bring to the world, before they turn into cynical adults, like us, like me. I can’t speak for y’all, but I guess I pop it to miss Bob-e.

Barbara Simpson Epps  04:53

Well, I’m going to do a culmination of all of your responses. I think about the footprints. And, the footprints that were laid before I came help me, and helped give me the determination, the strength, the resilience, the fight that I have for what I believe in. I see those same footprints being made by myself and each of you and others as we are traversing this new terrain, whether it’s COVID or whether it’s inflation or whether it’s looking at what’s happening with our democracy right now, we are all making footprints, and as I think about the young people in my life, especially my grandchildren. When my and now 10 year old grandson can talk to me about fascism and democracy and truly understand what that means for us, certainly, some footprints have been laid that open up his mind to possibility and reality, and what he wants and hopes for in his future, and I see that in all of our children. So I think about the footprints that we make, and I know that they can step into what I’ve done, what each of you have done, and I know they’ll do even greater things.

J. Robin Moon 06:17

Beautiful!

Cody Cotton  06:19

Beautiful, beautiful. I love that. I said we have a lot to be hopeful for all of us. Thank you for that. All right, let’s dive right into it. Kathleen, you’ve been a part of the leadership team literally since IRL has began. Tell us what you remember about the original vision for the IRL at the time of development, and also, what were your motivations and hopes for the program?

Dr. Kathleen Call  06:44

Sure. So it’s a bit muddy, but I remember feeling like there were people strategizing. You know, there was this huge call, not just for IRL, but three other programs and people like scrambling to be part of it, and I think for different reasons, right. For the prestige and money, but also the vision. And I was really motivated by the vision. I have been a huge fan of and participant in community engaged research, you know, pretty early in my career, in different aspects of the kind of research I like to do, and I think can be impactful. So the opportunity to, like, do a national program that was really encouraging that community, voice, drive and influence research and the solutions, like, I want to be part of that. So I was motivated from the very beginning to just to be part of that movement. Because there really was, I think, envisioned as a movement. You start with one cohort, they’re scattered all over. There’s another cohort the next year. And so I think just that the value of engagement and the value of doing research that can bring about change was huge. And so yeah, and it’s certainly evolved over the years, but that’s my motivation was very much about doing engaged research, impactful research.

Cody Cotton  08:27

Thank you. What about you? Miss Bob-e, what were your motivations and hopes for the program when you first got involved?

Barbara Simpson Epps  08:33

Well, when I first came into the program, I didn’t come in through the same doorway that Kathleen entered into. I came, I was a part of I was presenting with another group to see too, and I at that time, I met Michael Oakes, Jen Malcolm, Nancy, Fishman, Sarah Gollust. I met Kathleen and a lot of others who had sewed into the creation and beginning of this program, I was motivated and hope to help in guiding the teams around authentic relationship building and the importance of community engagement. I really wanted to influence others about understanding the history of community, particularly those that they had hoped to plan to work with, and I wanted to have them filter some of my questions, like, what has been the experience with community, what has been the community’s experience with researchers? And how do you build on that, and who are the people in the community you want to engage with? So I wanted to to really dig deep into the relationship and the history of community, so that those kind of questions would be answered and asked up front.

J. Robin Moon 09:51

Question for Kathleen, looking back the IRL, the research side of the IRL, and then community side of the IRL, I feel like we’ve been spending a lot of time integrating the two sides into one interdisciplinary, truly interdisciplinary and community collaborative work. And Kathleen you served in the role of Associate Director of Community Engagement for the entire time. As we said, While both of you and Miss Bob-e represented and fostered the community’s perspective, as in, like the you know, as opposed to the researchers perspective, you’re an academic yourself, we’re very curious to know what you have to say about how you approach your role and the goals initially that you set out to achieve through programs and maybe particularly for our fellows, and whether it panned out the way that you had envisioned, probably not an easy question. Was there, like, what would you say the biggest surprise might be?

Dr. Kathleen Call  10:57

So that was a long question. So I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Like, I feel like there was, there was like, the program as it launched, and then how it evolved, and then there’s like, my responsibility for a particular aspect of that program and how it involved. And they’re both, at first, I was thinking, well, they’re kind of separate things, but they’re really not, they’re really like. I think when the when we started IRL at the very, very beginning, we have the research centric approach. And people were, fellows were pushing back at that from the very beginning, and some members of the larger team were able to accept that critique, and others just tried to present the same material differently. So I think there was kind of these phases of evolution, and I think there was also, you know, a diversity of response among different members of the kind of the leadership team, but I had honestly gone into it like when we were conceptualizing, what are the things that we we need to really train or prepare or provide resources for interdisciplinary research leaders. I think we took a very academic as in one way conversation perspective, like, what do we need to give them? What do we need to give them? Not like, what can they give back to us? So I feel like that was the biggest evolution. So from really focusing on what do we have to offer, how do we want to set up this experience to like, what’s what? You know, are we meeting their needs? What are their needs and actually having conversations around that? So I’ve started in my own component of the program, engaged scholarship, thinking about, what do they need to know about community engaged research, what are its pros and its cons? How has it been received? Like very intellectualized idea of what the program should be, and then we quickly learned it was like, how do we help people build relationships and see the assets of different members of their team and what they bring and what’s their common goal? Like helping them develop a common goal that helped them get beyond some of the conflict that’s inevitable in relationships. So it really switched from this kind of intellectualizing and thinking about, how do I prepare folks, what resources will they need, to actually observing like relationships falling apart and thriving and, you know, going through tremendous conflict and then coming back together as a team to say, No, we have to set this aside. We are here for the community, and we can set aside our differences for the community and what we’re trying to do together. So it went from intellectual to emotional, relational and really listening and co-creating, you know that experience versus thinking, I know what’s best, they know what’s best, and how do I facilitate giving them what they say they need? So that listening component and relational component was huge. And just even like interdisciplinary is like, assumes that there’s an academic like academic disciplines, and that’s how it was looked at. We’re talking cross sectoral like just like variation in so many ways that each member of that three person team brings to what they’re trying to accomplish. And like fully recognizing that, valuing it and naming it, which we weren’t very good at at the beginning. I think we got better, but there’s always room for growth. That was such a long winded answer….

J. Robin Moon 14:53

You know, if we were to write an abstract of this long paper of IRL’s evolution, that will be it. I think you really said it really well. And I think that you know, step by step, it might, might not, be very easy to see how much we change, but looking back 10 years now, I think it’s just so much obvious and clearer, and it’s just really so humbling. Thank you for sharing what’s in your heart, knowing you that really came from your heart. Miss Bob-e, in our conversation with Nancy Fishman in the last episode, she talked about how important it was for the National Program Center to include someone who was from the community where the research is happening, so that that will be you tell us about how you’ve seen this work throughout your time with IRL and how it might have evolved in your understanding.

Barbara Simpson Epps  15:45

Well, what I’ve appreciated most is, and I’m going to add some of what Kathleen talked about is when I first joined, the term rigorous research was something that was always said, and I didn’t… I said, Please define I asked Michael Oakes, what is rigorous research? And we have many long conversations about it, and it’s still never, it just didn’t land inside of me because of the language that researchers use. It was just something this intersectionality of shared leadership with community leaders and researchers interdisciplinary. It wasn’t lay language. It wasn’t language that community understood and and it was a three legged stool. It set the odds up for there to be tension automatically when you have two researchers who have the same background, somewhat similar experiences and understanding about that, and a community person who may or may not have ever worked with a researcher or with researchers before, I felt that that that just kind of jaded the impact of community voice being heard and being understood. I think that there was a lack of good communication, and communication is the is the legs and heart of how to build relationships. I don’t know that there was real talk about shared values, about what’s important to me from a community perspective, what’s important to you as a researcher, understanding that researchers rely on these grants to to get a check, to be published, all of the things that are inherent to their to them, and this particular project and others never talked about flexibility and being able to pivot community people do that all the time, and always knowing that there is more than one way to accomplish a task and more. So I’ve I’ve seen, I say all that to say that I’ve seen it evolve in numerous ways, and I’ve appreciated most from a curriculum perspective that was so research oriented and intense that now it is more diverse and much more inspiring. The curriculum is. I remember having research 101, and other topics that community people were to cover, and it was a headache. They didn’t want to do it. They were boldly talking about not wanting to do it, and the community partners weren’t getting much out of that curriculum. And quite frankly, I don’t know that the researchers were getting that much out of the curriculum. What I do remember around the evolution is the founding of the EDI Task Force. The EDI Task Force pushed the needs of the community to the forefront in a lot of ways. And I remember having two subcommittees in the EDI Task Force, the accountability committee and the curriculum committee. Kathleen, which one I don’t remember which one you were on, but I think you were on probably curriculum, right? I think you brought curriculum, and Paul and Ifrah and a lot of the rest of us were on the accountability committee, and it was so great that we pushed and pushed and pushed so much so that I believe was in 2019 and the October Minnesota meeting that the roles of community and researchers were began to intertwine. And there were, actually, it was a face to face right before COVID, and there were presentations- Kathleen and I did a session together – I remember Joe Sammen did a session on, I think it was on white supremacy, I believe, or something similar to that. There are a lot of sessions where community people got to work with researchers in a way that it was an equal pairing and equal responsibility, and people stepped up. And there were so many topics that came up that it opened the door for more clarity, shared appreciation and camaraderie. And since that time, of course, you said the CAAB, the CAAB has been started. And since that time, I’ve seen things elevated in ways that had not been elevated before, even the need to take care of yourself, which is really something that is often overlooked, but from a community perspective or research perspective, you cannot do this work day in and day out, and not think about taking care of yourself. And so I think that even I think the CAAB came up with a recipe for leadership that I didn’t, I didn’t see so much being talked about around leadership. Initially, all I saw was research kinds of things, and I just couldn’t understand, how can you have interdisciplinary research leaders and nothing about what it takes to be a leader, either as a researcher or a leader as a partner with a researcher. I think if we talk more about leadership and the evolution and probably the conflict on teams would have been less. I wouldn’t, I won’t say it won’t, wouldn’t go all the way away, but it would have been less because talking about what it means to be a leader means that you have to be able to figure out how you get along. How do you resolve differences, how do you bring information to and from, and how do you do things with… rather you and me? So I just thought the evolution over time has just been really great in terms of what I see today, first on what was initially started, the research is rigorous, but the relationships are better.

J. Robin Moon 21:48

That’s such a great answer. Yes. Kathleen,

Dr. Kathleen Call  21:52

I was just gonna riff off of Bob-e around, like research rigor was initially like, very like, causal model, kind of focus, like proof, and it really evolved to rigor as relevancy, relevancy for people who can bring about change and like authenticity. And so I completely agree with Miss Bob-e on that and in this like, we, like the early years, we didn’t pay attention. It was like, so focused on interdisciplinary and research that leadership, like what defines leadership, was kind of ignored or invisible. And I really credit some of the work that you did with us in the early days, Miss Bob-e, around, relational leadership that – like to be a good leader. It’s not you dictating what others do. It’s like, you know, shared power “leading with” rather than dictating, you know. So it’s like this idea of power, sharing and recognizing the power of others on your team. So I just thought it was, it became more explicit, and later, in the later versions of the IRL program.

Barbara Simpson Epps  23:10

I also, I’d add, I’d add to Kathleen, I’d just say that too, I think that researchers began to appreciate community partners in a different way, and didn’t see them as somebody that was going to pick up the bucket and do all the cleaning that they didn’t want to do, but rather as a vital part of that three legged stool that if you didn’t have everybody working together, it would topple over. And that changed a lot.

J. Robin Moon 23:38

Yeah, it’s such a great reminder Miss Bob-e, that it didn’t just happen by osmosis. It took accountability. It took resistance and resilience of the community where we were the we are, the microcosm of the world, and that was well demonstrated in the way that we have evolved. That’s how I see it. So I really appreciate the response.

Barbara Simpson Epps  24:01

I want to add one more thing too, because I feel like not mentioning Dr. Zinzi  Bailey, in my experience, would be awful on my part, because she and I spent so much time together, as we still do, initially, combating and fighting and pushing against this rigorous research. We would sit in meetings for hours, and at the end, I’d call her, or she’d call me, and I’d say, what, what just happened? But what, what was just talked about? And I mean, we would be completely like in a land of not knowing, and it took many walks with some of the leaders who were in place at that time to really help them understand that a foreign language and you’re not valuing or hearing what other people are saying about how to move this process forward and how to have some longevity for people, as they are rolling out this work in their communities, longevity and sustainability, yeah.

Dr. Kathleen Call  25:10

And that accountability, Miss Bob-e like, expecting teams to like, set aside differences, value each other, yet the leadership wasn’t doing that. It was like there was a lot of deferring to loud voices that were holding up their PI-ship And then, you know, as though that leadership changed to people who were actually listening to ideas around how things could evolve for the better. Like, it took it, you know, it was kind of the beliefs about leadership and like, separate from the fellows, versus doing the work with the fellows. I think that was a huge change too. Like, you know, to lead, you have to be willing to do the same work as the folks that you’re working with or leading. And so instead of being observers of the fellows and creating these experiences like it, became much more co-creating and participating in and I think that was a really big shift. And I do, I do attribute to that, like the openness of our evolving leadership of the overall program, from like two epidemiologists, but one who really understands community and relational leadership and personal accountability, to be in a very different way.

J. Robin Moon 26:42

Oh, and for our listeners, EDI Task Force. It’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. I know the world. We know the world says DEI but EDI just rolls better off better, you know, rolls off your tongue better. So we say, EDI task force. Now let’s take the IRL outside of us and into the world. What’s next?

Cody Cotton  27:04

Yes, yes, I want to ask the question. I just want to make a very quick comment. I promise I’m gonna get right to the question. Miss Bob-e just really resonated when you talked about being able to have shared values. That’s very important within leadership. And I think it’s amazing that IRL was listening, because eventually you were able to lead and form the CAAB the Community Action Advisory Board. So a lot of progress there. Shout out to you. All right. Next question, all right, this question would be for both of you all. So how would you each describe the impact the IRL has made in moving us towards health equity.

Barbara Simpson Epps  27:41

Well, I would say that our I think leaders, not just within this program, but I think leaders even when I think about RWJF, and I think about many of the regional conferences I’ve had the pleasure and the joy of attending, I think that leaders are listening more intently to engage in community, and I think their their sessions, their language, really is beginning to focus on community strategy and addressing things that community needs in order to be successful. I also think that it’s highlighted the multiple areas of inequity within systems and institutions and in the community that help everybody focus on what’s important. And I think health equity issues come in many forms. You know, prior to this work, I did some work with other work, other entities here in town that looked at the grass and the green space, and they looked at the air that was being breathed in by traffic routes where certain people live. They’re on busy streets, so they’re getting all the fumes from buses and cars and breathing that in. And looking at the rate of asthma, particularly for young black boys. And so the health equity issues that come in many forms, I think people typically weren’t thinking about that. They tended to think about health equity only in the sense of what’s happening in your physical body. And so I think IRL the impact that it has made for me, and I think for other people, is really looking at the universe, that we were given a perfect planet with everything that we needed, and I’m really disappointed to see how we’ve cared for the earth. I remember my oldest granddaughter talking to me at age seven about waste and plastic and gardening, and she really held me accountable to “Okay, let’s put all of the plastic in the right container. Let’s put all of the the aluminum foil in the right spaces”. And today, she’s 32 and things have not gotten much better. As a matter of fact, I think it’s even worse, but IRL puts you in that space where you have greater awareness, greater sensitivity, and you really want to work on health equity, and I believe that they’ve amassed hundreds of advocates, allies and accomplices to move in that direction across this nation and to get the job done. And I think people are creative. They’re more enlightened. And I just, you know, if I had to find a program, and I’ve been a fellow in two other programs, I think by far, this was probably the most powerful I’ve experienced. Probably because I’m not a fellow and I get to sit on the other side and hear how well people plan, leadership plans for everything, the number of discussions, thinking about every single thing so that when they do come together, they have the kind of experiences that acknowledges what they their contributions, acknowledges them in this field, and rewards them in many ways, that will charge them up and refuel them to keep pushing health equity as as something that we all have to continue to think about and contribute towards.

Dr. Kathleen Call  31:31

I’m glad you went first. Miss Bob-e. This was the question that I really thought of. Like, you know, I can think of a lot of different ways of approaching it. So, like, in the grand scheme of things, you know, we talk about dismantling structural racism and moving towards health equity. It’s like, I don’t think I’m going to see that in my lifetime, but what are the kind of the foundational things that I think IRL has really worked at to gift to each other and gift to the fellows, and that is this kind of intentional intentionality around creating experiences where relationships can be formed. You see somebody as a human being with complexity and values and not just an acquaintance that you run into at the conference every year. So like that, intentionality about building relationships, creating a space for people to go deep, if they are so inclined, but also not require it and make them uncomfortable with with being in the space. So they’re welcome, they’re invited, but it’s not demanded of them. And I think they’ve responded really well to that, and when they I think it like it sparked this kind of interest. “Could I create the space in my future projects?” That’s my hope, that it can really spark that centering of research as relationship and relationships are required to have impactful research and to bring about social change. How did IRL model that for us? How can we do that for our students? Work with students. Work in the community, work amongst our boards as community researchers, and what’s the future of research like? What does that look like in a really positive way that you don’t usually get in academia or a research 101, intended for community members, right? So it really got to the core of the heart of research is like doing work that’s important to you and that you hope you can have an impact on even if it doesn’t happen in your life. But are you creating a foundation of hope and co-creation with people so that they want to keep doing their best work towards this towards that end. Again, I feel like I’m rambling, but it’s like it when I think about answering this question, it really is a question from my heart and not my head, and I think that that’s where we’ve done the most in evolving as a program, moving far away from the head and much more towards the heart of what research is.

Barbara Simpson Epps  34:29

I always think about some of the conflicts that we’ve had at some of our that are inevitable when you bring people together. And always think about the preparation and the thought given to the ‘what ifs’, and in spite of the what ifs, there’s always something. But I always think about a couple of incidents that I won’t mention, but I see how people have moved beyond that conflict, the grace. I think what it is, is the grace that I have been, that I’ve seen. Which is a part of health equity. I think sometimes we like to take the human response out of the work that we do, the tension out of the work that we do, the natural reactions that people may have out of what we do. But I think I initially came in to do a session on ACEs, the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which is all about trauma, And trauma is one of those things that lives in all of us. And when I think about health equity, how I’ve seen that show up, and how everybody on this screen right now has shown up and responded to that. It makes me proud to be a part of a team like that. We do it with compassion, we do it with grace. We do it with an amount of sensitivity to everybody that is included in that event. And I think the more we are living on this planet, the more we’re going to be challenged about moving towards a structural and systemic racism in our healthcare system. And the only way to do that is to do it from a with a compassionate lens, so that you everybody together at the end of the day, and I could talk more because I think about the restorative justice work we we’re doing other things that we’re doing that is all a part about moving towards health equity in ways that weren’t an original part of this work.

Dr. Kathleen Call  36:37

I 100% agree, Miss Bob-e, especially like this idea of you know, from the very beginning, we talked about conflict is inherent in relationships. How do you move with the conflict, through the conflict? But we didn’t have the whole harm and healing restorative justice that really completed that picture. So it’s one thing to say, conflict happens, and how do you grow from it, but also having the healing and recognition of harm part of it that we didn’t have that language at the very beginning, and I wish we would have woken up to that sooner, and perhaps people were trying to get the group to wake up to that sooner, but I think it was, it’s it kind of helped fill a hole in how we were approaching the inevitability of conflict.

Barbara Simpson Epps  37:31

That’s a practice. I think, everything that we’ve learned around restorative justice and other practices about being human centered, it’s impactful. It’s been impactful for me. It’s impactful for other people. I’ve seen how people show up and how when they have the time to really think things through and process things that it it leads towards better relationships, more understanding, authenticity, inclusion, grace, all of those things.

Dr. Kathleen Call  38:01

…and health equity on these different levels, right from microcosm, little relationships, to much bigger, the organization of how we’ve been doing our work.

J. Robin Moon 38:15

All those, all those things, therefore, health equity. I’m just going to note how all the vocabularies we’re using in this conversation, we haven’t said the word ‘method’ once. Health Equity means whatever statistics you know, improved, you know, declined. This is a remarkable open conversation, and we really appreciate this. So we’ve been talking about how your impact on IRL, what you know, what you have contributed to the program and the fellows. This is our last question for you. Both of you tell us about the impact that IRL has had on you. How has IRL changed you?

Dr. Kathleen Call  39:01

I would say it hit me at the like it came at the right moment in my kind of development as a academic and somebody who believes in the power community. I talked to earlier about intellectualizing the program, intellectualizing the problem of certain problems, and until it’s in your heart, I think it’s really hard to do really good work. And I think that was my evolution as a really, as a researcher, like not just learning everything I could about a certain area or subject to really know, like knowing people that were impacted by just like being open to the relationship, being open to feeling the pain of different things are like our health system does to people. Like not just reading about it, observing it, but actually like feeling it, having empathy and compassion. And that’s where I think IRL kind of fast track that for me, because I met so many people that were doing amazing work and so passionate about it in a way that I hadn’t been exposed to in most of the kind of academic circles I had been part of. And certainly the community like it was like this blending of my two worlds, like living in academia, but working in and with community, and then having that all come together, it was just like it was something that was so exciting, and I think I was ready for that, like being able to really see where I had to evolve along with the program, and feeling safe to do that because of all the people I was in relationship with in this program.

Barbara Simpson Epps  41:08

I think for me, I never understood why I was asked to be a part of IRL, but that’s my honest answer. I didn’t have a role, and I used to just, I like walking around and just being present in ways that people may not notice. I like to see how people twitch sometimes, or who walked with who, or who talked with who, or when people sat in a corner, why they sat in a corner. I liked just being in the space with people that I thought were just geniuses. I liked hearing them in small conversations that I wasn’t engaged in. I liked sitting in a lot of the sessions. When I think back on all of the sessions that I sat in all of the learning that I had, all the remarkable people that I’ve met, the relationships that I have with people, and knowing that many of those relationships will continue. Then I look back on how I grew over the program. I grew in all kinds of ways, probably relationships I always thought I was pretty good at, but I’ve had some misses in that, and so that has helped me grow as well. But it’s helped me really look at the human condition in ways that I hadn’t before. Even when people come and they think that they are okay, people are always looking for connection, and I have a greater sensitivity for connecting with people, one on one in those spaces, especially when I see the same people that are continually standing alone, people who are introverts, who don’t speak up. People who I know have so much to contribute, and yet they are silent. So it’s helped me in my walking around in spaces to not only observe, but to step up in ways that I hadn’t before, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

Cody Cotton  43:21

I appreciate you all both for sharing. Well, thank you. And a lot is resonating. We know from just this past experience that working towards health equity can be daunting. It can be challenging, especially a large effort, given what the experience has been these days. Audre Lorde reminds us that caring for ourselves is not self indulgence, it is self preservation, which is an act of political warfare and an act of resistance. So with that being said and keeping that in mind, tell us how you all are taking care of yourselves.

Barbara Simpson Epps  44:00

Well, I have a practice that I’ve always had for a number of years. I like to wake up in the morning early, and I spend time with my God, just in meditation, just being quiet. I spend time thinking about what’s going on inside of me so that I’m prepared to be decent with the world that is out there. I don’t think I have. I never want to take that part of me out into the world that I need to keep at home, especially when I’m not like at myself. Is a term that that African Americans would say that I wouldn’t clothe in my right mind. A lot of people carry a lot of things, and I take time in the morning to get all of those things out of me and to prepare myself to be a decent person in the world. Because just as I know that I have issues, I know I’m going to encounter people whose issues are mountains compared to mine. And so it’s like complaining about a pair of shoes, and then you meet somebody that doesn’t have any feet, or complaining about not being able to do my eyebrows, when you meet somebody whose face has been scarred and burned. So I think about, how can I be the best me when I show up in the world? And that’s a habit that I’ve had most of my life, which centers me. It opens doors for me, because some days I’ll say, Well, you need to go out and take a walk. You might need to go out and have that bowl of ice cream that you’ve not had for a long time, and you might need to call somebody up and say, I was thinking about you, or you might need to call somebody up and say, It’s time for us to talk. It’s those kinds of things that prepare me to meet the world head on and with my best self, and I owe that to me, and I owe that to the people that I encounter.

Dr. Kathleen Call  46:08

I think my self care regimen is somewhat similar to Miss Bob-e in that I wake up early so I can have some time to myself. I wouldn’t say I meditate, but I just like the silence in time to kind of reflect about what the day is going to bring and figure out how to be present for the day. I think, you know, my favorite way of taking care of myself is being with people that I love and and some of those are conflicted relationships, but there’s still people I love and just being able to kind of linger and pause and not react like that’s the way I’m trying really hard to take care of myself and the people I love, not reacting – pausing, lingering and trying to work things through. And honestly, I’m like an ever ready bunny, like I need to expel some energy. So walking and biking is absolutely central to my self care, because I just gotta get the jiggles out. So it’s all those things.

Barbara Simpson Epps  47:24

Pivoting is always important for me, because there’s so many people in my life with six kids and 10 grandkids and three great grandkids, I have to be able to pivot. And so I prepare my day with thinking about how I can step up or step back or step in or step away.

Cody Cotton  47:45

Love that – that resonates. That’s an RJ principle of ours knowing when to step up and want to step back. And Kathleen, I was sure I was going to I was going to have to remind you that walking was one of yours, just in case.

Dr. Kathleen Call  47:59

You thought it was going to be first, right?

J. Robin Moon 48:04

I was like, “wait. What about walking?”

Dr. Kathleen Call  48:09

Miss Bob-e inspired me to be more self reflective about my response.

J. Robin Moon 48:16

Thank you so much, Kathleen and Miss Bob-e for being so open, being willing to be vulnerable in this space. You’ve said so much, but I’m thinking about Grace Lee Boggs, a great American activist and scholar who said, transform yourself before you transform the world. And I keep on hearing that as a theme. And that’s also I agree. That’s something IRL, among other things IRL has taught me.

And thank you for our listeners for tuning in, for this wonderful conversation today. We want this to be a two way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you listeners – share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page where we will post our show notes and any resources discussed in this episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us today, and remember, we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time, bye friends!

Mandy LeBreche  49:38

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

The Evolution of the IRL Program

Season 1, Episode 5 | June 15, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee and Mandy LaBreche
• Guests: Zinzi Bailey, Mandy LeBreche, Toben Nelson

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the promising practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:20

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m Krystal Lee, and today my co host is the inimitable Mandy LeBrech, hey Mandy.

In previous episodes, we have heard from some of the original program leadership, and today we are thrilled to have current members of the leadership team with us. Today we have IRL co directors, Dr Zinzi Bailey and Cody cotton, as well as senior advisor and former co director, Dr Tobin Nelson. Welcome y’all and thanks for joining us.

Zinzi Bailey  01:02

Hey, hey, it’s great to be here. 

Mandy LeBreche  01:05

Hey, friends, as you know, we like to start our meetings with a check in question, and this podcast is certainly no exception to that. So our check in question for today is, what is one thing that makes you feel hopeful these days. And I can start, I think what’s making me hopeful these days is our younger generation, the youths, as I like to say. I feel like they seem, to me, like the most inclusive generation. They’re more naturally able to embrace differences, and I feel like they have a lot of empathy and a sense of curiosity for the world around them. I think things that are happening that are good and bad, I feel like I see them better able to maybe lift up the good stuff and fight the bad stuff. And I always think back to what a former IRL teammate and friend, Haley Cureton, [Hey, Haley!] shared with me in the early days of IRL, and she would talk about how curiosity helps to develop and nurture empathy, and I think that’s a lot of what I see in our younger generations and kind of the young adult population. I will toss it to Krystal.

Krystal Lee  02:22

Thanks Mandy, the thing that’s making me hopeful today is still like individual acts of kindness. So when I see people helping people, when I see folks taking intentional steps towards cultivating community and just, you know, caring for each other, even in, you know, the unprecedented times that we’re experiencing. I personally would like to experience some “precedented times”, but until we can manage that, I am taking hope – I’m feeling hopeful about individuals caring for each other, and I will toss it to Cody Cotton.

Cody Cotton  03:01

Appreciate that Krystal. I said I was going to change my answer, but I think I mistake with the basics, the origins kind of leaning more towards what Mandy said, the youth. There’s so much hope in the youth. Definitely, if you have an environment where we can teach them how to do better, as well as help them learn from our mistakes that we’ve made. So definitely lean on the youth – they give us a lot of hope for today. Throwing it to you Toben.

Toben Nelson  03:27

Yeah, thanks. I like those answers a lot, but I’m going to go in a different direction. I feel like what is making me hopeful is that people are pissed, that people are really angry and not okay with how things are, are going, and they want to see something different. And there’s, there’s a standard I think, that people are setting for themselves and for their communities and for their broader affiliations nationally, and that I think anger is okay, and it helps keep us accountable, and helps keep us on track. And I always come back to the definition of public health is the constant redefinition of what is unacceptable. And there’s a lot that we address that’s unacceptable, completely unacceptable. And I take hope in, and some amount of pride too, in working with people who are constantly trying to be better, so that, that that’s a weird way of saying, that’s what gives me hope. Zinzi…

Zinzi Bailey  04:34

Well, that’s a hard act to follow, but I think I’m going to steal from all of you being the last person I think that’s my privilege to steal from you all in that, this weekend, I was at a protest, which is a peaceful way of exercising my rights in this democracy, supposedly, right? So being able to be in that space, there were lots of young people, young kids who were seeing what democracy in action meant. Being able to articulate where we currently stand, and being able to say, hey, I don’t really agree with what’s going on at the base level. I don’t have to get involved in all the key components, but I don’t like the way my friends are being treated and being able to be there, be inclusive. And within that space, I was really I had some of my faith restored in human beings, because even in the face of opposition and disagreement, everyone was in such a positive space. And disagreements, just like rolled off of us and we were just together, right? So being in that intergenerational space and exercising rights, I find that hopeful. 

Krystal Lee  05:55

Thanks y’all for checking in. I always appreciate hearing from other folks, what’s making them hopeful? Because, you know, it’s kind of helps me to feel, oh yeah, maybe I missed that, or give me something to feel positively about in in times when I don’t feel so positive. So thank you so much for sharing that. How about we just jump right into the conversation? Zinzi and Tobin, you’ve been with the program for almost as long as Mandy, who is a day one person, tell us what you remember about the original vision for IRL at the time of development, and then what were your like motivations and hopes for the program?

Toben Nelson  06:35

I mean, I think early days when I started as a senior advisor for the program, and really came in with the research team. I really got the impression that, like folks, were really thoughtful about trying to put this all together and also recognizing that there was a “seat of the pants element” to it. I think the thing that a lot of folks talked about in early days was “building the plane while we’re trying to fly it”, which I don’t necessarily love that metaphor, but I understand what it means, at least in the IRL context. And then, I think the nice thing about RWJ is that they’re really willing to let people roll with it. There’s not a lot of barriers or specific ways that they want things to happen. They really trusted us as a team to learn as we were going and make adjustments as we were going, and when I came in as as director the the I did not have an intention of really trying to make big changes, but we were getting a lot of feedback, and there was the demand for it, and it was coming really from the fellows. And I think the best thing that we could do, the best thing we ever have done, is listen carefully to what they’re saying and try and make adjustments. I don’t think we succeeded in every case, but, but I do think we tried to be responsive, and I hope, and I think we’ve gotten some feedback anyway, that some of the changes we made helped improve the program. So I take some satisfaction in that, and I think we’ve also built in some structures so we can open up the channels to better respond, better listen, better give fellows opportunities to share their thoughts with us and taking that criticism, taking that and being accountable to them, I think, has been, has been a good thing for the program.

Zinzi Bailey  08:48

And I joined not too far after Toben. I remember we joined the research team in particular, and I think we were both kind of like figuring out, what is this program? We got some initial information, but there’s a lot of like, “okay, so what do we do?” And I remember that initially we were tasked to build out more of the elements of the research team interactions. And I think for a lot of us, we were still trying to figure out what, what is the direction that we want to be in? And so I think we spent a good amount of time just taking that in. And I think what was very clear was this desire for amplifying and enhancing community engaged research, having these, these relationships that were being built, but there being an attention with how we defined research rigor, especially in traditional disciplines, right? And as we have received them, right? So I think part of our challenge with the research team, and then beyond is balancing what that means, right? What it means to be community engaged, community driven, and producing research that’s worth doing. And that doesn’t have to be at odds, right? And it doesn’t mean that it’s a clinical trial. So I think that has been a lot of IRL navigating what are the things that matter, what are the things that are going to have impact on community in a lasting way, and how do we navigate that through data and research? So I think as we’ve gone along, there’s been a lot of pivots in terms of what we talk about, and I think we would, you know, I think it was purposefully vague what research rigor was and what community was. And I think as we’ve gone along, I think we’ve meandered into more solid conceptualizations of what those things are.

Mandy LeBreche  10:56

Z, so you’ve been involved in IRL for a while now. I think maybe year two, around year two is when you joined so you’re a year two person, and now that you’ve been serving as co director, can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve seen the program evolve over your time on IRL, and how and why have program priorities shifted over the last 10 years, or maybe eight years for you.

Zinzi Bailey  11:25

I think there are a number of things that have changed throughout the program. I think, number one, I think we became a lot more intentional around what community meant, right? I think there were, as Toben said, we were building the plane as we were flying it, which I feel very uncomfortable doing that, but that’s the life that we live, right? But I think people had an intuition, okay? There’s something about community that’s important, right? So how do we define that? Initial ideas of how to create these teams, be more intentional about how communities are included. I know in some of the initial passes, changing some of the questions that we had interviewing potential fellows or potential teams just being, being more probing around connections to communities and … how were teams going to be held accountable to their communities moving forward? And I think that was a very important shift. It wasn’t just about like, Okay, what is the research project that you’re going to be able to create, but how are you going to make the work that you’re going to do- how are you going to be accountable to the communities that you’re a part of.

As it’s moved on, I think we’ve been more intentional about like, what does a community partner get out of this program? What do community partners need? Which has been a kind of evolving story. Again, we haven’t gotten it completely right, but we’re, we’re, if not anything else, responsive to feedback and what people need. I think as we’ve gotten further, yes, there are very specific things that communities or community partners might need. But you know, what are the key differences between a community and research partner? Right? There are some elements that are structural that we can start getting at in terms of exercise of power and money and all of those key components, and being able to navigate those and maybe create ways of dispersing funds that are more aware and and considering of those, those connections, and we developed a group the CAAB so that kind of help advise us in terms of directions and provide ideas and new directions, lead certain things that we see as like assets for community partners, right?

So we’ve figured out different ways to further define this community component. I think we have further to go. If we had another 10 years, we would go even further, but I think we’ve learned so much, right? I think there was an initial idea around this, like community organizing thing being a thing and important. I think we didn’t formalize exactly what we expected or hoped different teams to take away from some of the skill sets or or case studies or people that they’re interacting with, but they were able to connect with this idea of base building and there being power in people, and being able to connect in that way.

And I think as we’ve gone on, we’ve really delved a little bit more into restorative justice, because while we talk about all these things about community and like the definitions and this work and the skill set, really we are all individuals; people trying to connect. Caring about key things that you know, we’re bringing our entire lives with us into an interaction and being able to connect with one another. And sometimes that goes well, sometimes not so well. But all of this is built on relationships, right? So we’ve invested more in what ‘community’ means for our IRL community. So that means getting to know one another, not just our work, but what draws us to this work, what connects us to want to do similar work, and how we can work together moving forward. So we’ve we’ve invested more in that, I think so those are some of the very key investments that we’ve made in this program, pivots and changes.

Krystal Lee  15:46

Such a comprehensive overview of the last eight years! Thank you so much for for highlighting that there’s, there’s so many things that you’ve mentioned you talked about having to make pivots. We’re talking about this concept of building the plane as it flies, which is, like number one, fascinating, but also terrifying to me personally. And I can see how, you know, it becomes necessary as a result of that way of doing, yeah, the way of doing things that it becomes necessary to pivot and change and listen and do all of these things that I’m hearing you all talk about. One of the things that you identified was the development of the CAAB as a way to kind of elevate and try to serve the community and the community partners that are part of IRL in a way that was not necessarily conceptualized at the beginning of the program. So I want to invite Cody to tell us a little bit about the CAAB. Cody, you started as a member of the CAAB, and now you serve as co director of the IRL program with Zinzi. So tell us about that experience. Tell us about the work that you did with the CAAB, how it’s evolved over time, and just how you have experienced that.

Cody Cotton  16:59

Yes, appreciate it. Zinzi, you did an amazing job. I wish I could just cut up and clip most of the things you said when talking about it. But the CAAB, the Community Action Advisory Board. Where do I start? One, I’m just grateful for the rest of our CAAB members who’ve done an unbelievable job since the incubation of it. But our main goal was to advise leadership on possibly more ways to center community – think about community, not just community as a whole, but the community partners. Then it started to expand a little bit more, to being able to be involved more during some of our in person meetings, to being able to get engaged with the fellows, to possibly teaching workshops, to leading more in a restorative way. Zinzi hit on it before. What does it mean to be restorative, and what did it look like to bring this into IRL setting? It looked to – it looked like being more, more than just restorative, sitting down in the circle, listening to what people have to say, but truly understanding who we are. And who we are isn’t just our names, but our values and our principles that we choose to bring to the space together and how we choose to see each other. So there’s been so many different aspects of not just how the CAAB got involved, but eventually how we continue to evolve as a program to ask the important questions like, not just what does it mean to be in community, or what does research mean, but how are we modeling ourselves as leaders? How are we putting being a leader in the forefront of what we do? So so much, so much has been gained in the last few years, especially the last 10 years, but I would like to say it’s been a beautiful progress since we’ve been able to add value and support, not only just as the CAAB, but being grateful to be in the role as co director as well. 

Zinzi Bailey  18:46

And I would be remiss to not call out that this CAAB actually evolved out of the EDI task force. So it was a group of people. It was supposed to be a short term, you know, collection of folks trying to kind of change some of the structures of IRL to reflect the diverse groups of people that were part of it. From making sure that we weren’t just like going with the contractor that did the thing that we said that we wanted to have, but that it was really embedded in who was part of the program and what we wanted to bring out in those people. And knowing that, you know, some folks have had deep experience with, for example, Diversity Equity and Inclusion training or things like that, maybe could have even led things themselves, and being able to show that people are in different places, and being able to speak to that. So out of that initial group of IRL fellows, and then alum, you know, came this idea that actually, yes, there’s the EDI Task Force, but there is an overall need for spelling out more of what community partners needed. And that is kind of the genesis of the CAAB. So from the fellows, in a more directed feedback way through the EDI Task Force, came this CAAB.

Cody Cotton  20:12

I love that Z, i think it even hits on the point of just saying how we evolve. It wasn’t just by being in meetings thinking that we have all the answers. It was easy to take advice, listen to fellows, figure out how we could get engaged. I even think about the community corner, the way we’ve been able to give space to community partners, just to talk amongst themselves, to talk about the wins, to talk about what’s working out for them, to talk about ways things to get better, not just within their own community, but with even within their project. So a lot of improvement. I feel like the IRL journey, if you could explain it in one word, and in my opinion, I would just say growth. And then two, I’ll say intentional growth.

Toben Nelson  20:56

Yeah, I want to speak to that a little bit. I think the initial idea of IRL was a good one. I think there was a recognition that community members can bring a lot more to the table and enhance doing research. But I think it wasn’t not until we got into it, and some of the tensions that exist in doing this kind of work, especially community engaged research, really started to come up. And it’s not just that we were doing it, but we also had to go back and repair or really reorient the whole way of doing work with community partners in community than I think maybe was initially conceptualized, and that push really came from the community partners in early cohorts.

So the feedback we got, and we heard this a lot in early meetings, like they’re tired of being exploited, they’re tired of this sort of colonial parachute in, take data and go out, without really engaging with the community, without really listening to the kinds of questions that they wanted answered. What kinds and what do you do with the research findings when you generate them, anyway? So I think that really was a reorienting, and I would say we’re part way through that reorienting. I don’t think we’ve necessarily nailed it at this point, but the process of doing all this and the process of taking the feedback and hearing some of the anger from folks has prompted us, I think, to try and reorient a little bit to a different way of doing work. And I think the value of engagement with community really does shine through, including our having research that is led by members of the community, having members of the community ask questions that they need answers to. And then what follows is a different kind of structure for doing research. And it also follows that there’s a shift in power and control of money. And I think a lot of what I’ve learned is when I came up, “Oh, you got to go study hard and get your PhD and come in and you’ll be celebrated as this great mind, this great scholar”. And the reality is, unless you actually produce something, no one cares about that. And the process of that doesn’t select for humility, and I think humility is a big lesson, especially for researchers in this process. And I think we’re trying to craft a new way of doing research that we still think is more valuable than the sort of the old ways, the traditional ways of doing research. I think we’re on our way, and I look forward to more progress in that space.

Krystal Lee  24:14

Wow, y’all have said a lot about like, changes and shifts to how things have happened over the last nine years, and even in the past five years, like we’ve been through a global pandemic, we’ve been through lockdowns, and not to mention, like all the current changes in the public health DEI/EDI landscape, and you’ve talked about some of the shifts that you’ve made in response to these changes, and I wonder if there are lessons that you have taken away from the experience that you would be willing to share, for folks who are engaged in work like this, or folks who are having to pivot in this time. What advice from this experience would you share with somebody who is having to deal with a lot of change right now?

Zinzi Bailey  25:03

I can start where I think you have to lean into your team and be able to connect with those who are around you. Be open and curious about what others are experiencing both on the team, and you know for us, it was what the fellows were experiencing. And I think especially during the pandemic, but I think also now, being willing to bypass what is planned and go off script to understand what the needs are and to be able to start to address them. And I think one of the things that’s necessary in order for that to happen is to have a little bit of humility in terms of, like, “Oh, I know what to do, or I don’t know what to do”, being able to because I think especially researchers… Well, I’ll speak for myself as a researcher, what I experience a lot is that we are brought up to get to a point where we say that we are an expert and that we know all the things, and we have a plan, or we have this research that indicates X or Y, and we have a deep knowing of exactly what to do. And I think that’s not necessarily that helpful, and especially in times like these, where there’s continuous pivots, there is no way to know exactly what to do, right? So I think that level of humility is necessary, and people are willing to share more of what they’re going through and what they might actually need, as opposed to trying to be like, “okay, yeah, I’m also a person who knows exactly what I’m doing, and I have no problems. My team has no problems, and everything is fine.” It allows, if you open up that environment so that people can share from where they don’t know where to go, or there are missteps, or there are team tensions or conflicts like then I think we’re better able to navigate the different pivots and be able to move forward in a way that works. So that’s what I would offer.

Cody Cotton  27:25

Love that, Z. Just want to speak on it really quickly. I think I said a lot about this already, but think one of my favorite parts, when I think about IRL and the impact it’s had on its fellows, often after we meet, we talk about what we’ve learned during the conference, but often people talk about how they had opportunity to reset, to have a different narrative, a different perspective on just their lives. We’ve done a great job on leadership, but we do an even better job onwhat does it mean to be human? What does it mean to stand for something? What does it mean to just have faith, right? Just the small things. But I think when we look at the model, what IRL has represented, and definitely in a world we want to see is to truly work on yourself. There’s so much impact that could be done in the community. There’s a lot of impact that could be done in the organization, but it truly starts with ourself. 

Toben Nelson  28:18

I’ll just add, we’re talking a little bit about the pandemic kind of happening right in the middle of IRL, and that’s a really terrible experience. I certainly wish that had not happened. It really laid bare, I think, some of the tensions that we saw within the program, especially the kind of real stark differences between researchers and community members, where researchers were paused and they felt a little handcuffed and well, we can’t do certain things. And on the community side, it was hair on fire working around the clock, [we] just saw really remarkable efforts by folks in those community organizations, our community partners within IRL, how much they were dedicated, how much they cared about community, and how hard they were willing and able to work to meet the needs of their communities. And I think that experience was humbling, from the perspective of researchers and a lot of folks shared that like just watching their community partner go through what they were going through and feeling a little bit helpless. “Oh, we can’t do our focus groups because people are trying to survive, and they’re trying to get their needs met in a whole variety of different ways”, and it just really, for me, emphasized those really different perspectives that researchers and community members are bringing to the table when they work on research projects together. And I think we’re really trying to strive for a reciprocity of understanding for doing community engaged work. So really having that ability to see what someone else is going through, understand what their needs are, understand what their self interests are, and then still be able to work with each other. And I think those are really different for researchers and for community members, and it’s still important for us to be working together on some of these projects and bringing those different perspectives. But foundationally, it is going to require a large dose of humility. It’s going to require a lot of work on relationships. And we’ve certainly seen great relationships. We’ve seen a lot of very tense relationships across teams. And you know, and just being able to strive for that reciprocity of understanding for everybody. I think that is an important key for successful work in this space.

Krystal Lee  31:11

Oh, my goodness, you all have shared so so much, and it’s, I’m not going to try to to summarize it, but I it’s bringing me back to this book called Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, and she there’s so much in in the book, and I highly recommend it to others, but what I’m hearing from you as the program navigated the necessary shift, it brings me back to something that she said, that adrienne maree brown says in her book, where she the quote is, “… we are realizing that we must become the systems we need. No government, political party or corporation is going to care for us, so we have to remember how to care for each other.” And another thing she says in the book, this brings me to my next question for y’all, which is another thing she says in the book, is that “…we must aim to be an organizational model for the change we call for in the world, for the change that we are calling for in the world”. Can you tell us about from your experiences and these lessons that you’ve learned and you’ve shared with us, how have you seen IRL be and become a model for the world that we want to see?

Zinzi Bailey  32:24

I think that’s a big question, right? So I feel like we have put forth a different way of thinking about leadership where we’re I think a lot of times when we talk about, oh, who are the greatest leaders in our history, we think of these like singular figures, who are charismatic leaders, who are great orators and decision makers. And there’s specific biographies of them. And I think what we’re proposing through this program and through how we try to pivot and change, is an idea of shared leadership, where, yes, there may be a leader, a couple leaders, or we are going to share some of the those leadership responsibilities, but being able to call on one another, where it does not become a cult of ego or a cult of personality, it becomes about the mission that we have at hand, about the people who we have, who are at the center of what we do. We are talking about interdisciplinary leaders, right, and how we lead together, and I think as we move forward, I hope that maybe business school, business school model may not be the sole way of moving forward, and it’s not just a team leadership model. It’s that we are in deep relationship with one another, and we are sharing power for a joint future. So I think in that, you know that joint future is what is holding us together, that is having us take on different roles, and not necessarily needing just one person at the top, the PI or that sort of thing, the hero. We’re not going for a hero model of leadership,

Toben Nelson  34:27

The sort of the flip side of humility -and I think the enemy of good leadership is hubris. And I think recognizing that, you know, no one person knows it all, no one person has the right way. This hero model of leadership, it’s fun to write and read about those kinds of leadership models. I don’t think it reflects reality, especially in our communities, and embracing a diversity of perspectives, embracing diversity of ideas and ways forward, and putting things into the marketplace of ideas and that broader set of things, and seeking those out really enriches the experience. If you’ve got a leader who’s more autocratic, more susceptible to hubris, the strict father model of leadership, where everyone’s looking to that one person for all the answers. [I] think that has some very severe limitations. And then if you’re taking that model, you really have to enforce the credibility, the value of the strict father. And I’m saying “father” very specifically in this case, [I] think that’s not a good long term strategy. And I think innovation is best served by that diversity of perspectives and challenging oneself on various ideas and various decision points. At some point you do have to make decisions, but I think we make better decisions with those broader perspectives.

Cody Cotton  36:13

Thisreally resonates. Toen, thank you again for sharing when we talk about the model for the world and what IRL has been, I just think, from the simple example of literally, the fellowship, what we’re asking our fellows to do within leadership, we’re not asking ourselves not to do. We do a lot of figuring out, what can we do better, self assessing, trying to become as self-aware as possible in the areas that we’re looking to grow and ask our fellows to grow in. That’s why we’ve done different storytelling training, restorative practice, training. I mean, you all name it. You’ve been around longer than I have, but we’ve been very intentional about how we move forward, you know? So I just think, just briefly speaking, we’ve literally modeled, what does it look like to be a leader and to show up in places and not know the right answer. Knowing when to step up and when to step back. So that’s been very important. I love to say that IRL has exemplified that in so many different ways.

Toben Nelson  37:12

I just want to add to that too. One of the concerns I had always had, and we certainly had gotten feedback on this point was that it’s IRL, it’s a leadership program. The L is for leader. Where’s the leadership training? And I’ve mostly felt like leadership training is worthless, at least the sort of the standard leadership training, like, Oh, you’re going to come to a seminar or workshop and we’re going to teach you how to be a leader. I don’t think that’s how it works. And I think maybe, I worried a little bit about not bringing content, but I didn’t know what the content was as I’ve gone along, and I think as we’ve added things like the restorative justice practice and and pay more attention to community perspectives. Really felt the leadership training here is more experiential, and it’s part of the reason that a cohort model is valuable. So it’s not that we’re experts and coming in and saying, here’s the way, here’s the cookbook. You get this as a part of your registration for participating in this program. It really is that sort of emergent quality of we’re learning as we go and as we’re trying to be leaders in these spaces and also getting that peer feedback as well. And everybody has to be the kind of – has to be true to themselves as a leader as well being able to navigate that make mistakes, and we can develop a long list of mistakes that were made in this program, but coming through that, I’m hopeful that most folks got an experiential leadership experience, and that they feel more prepared and able and know what the what thematically are some of the components of strong leadership, and then everybody can craft that to their own style and make it their own. 

Mandy LeBreche  39:22

Wow, I’m loving all of this, and the time is flying by. So I’ll bring us to our next question. It is adrienne maree brown also says in her book emergent strategy, that, and I quote, “all that you touch, you change, and all that you change changes you”. Can each of you tell us about the impact that IRL has had on you, individually and personally, and how has your involvement with the program changed you?

Zinzi Bailey  39:55

Mandy, that’s a massive question.

Toben Nelson  39:59

Gonna need one of those Barcelona couches to answer that question.

Zinzi Bailey  40:06

I feel like there’s so much and that I’m not going to be able to articulate it all. So I’ll just point to one very glaring element. I think that IRL has been my testing ground. And I don’t know what the best word is, but like a playground of sorts, if I can make it a little bit more whimsical in thinking about my leadership on a whole. Thinking about positioning, and thinking about those leaders that I saw as, oh, they they published a lot, or they led all these people, and they were able to have these speeches, or they’re able to do these things, and seeing these like very charismatic personalities, and thinking about them being people right? And having faults and having biases and interacting with other groups of people, and being influenced by other folks, and having changes that they made along their journeys. And so I think from that standpoint, entering into the space more tentatively, there was that initial “okay, I can take the lead on something”, but then being able to move on to essentially be like, “okay, can have more decision making”, but then have this shared idea of leadership, sharing power, not being the final decision maker on some things, trusting others, and being able to be curious about directions. So I feel like I have definitely learned so much, and I can tell you, like the people that I have met through this program have been the best people who will continue to be a part of my life moving forward and being able to develop those relationships year after year, month after month, Zoom call after zoom call, I think has been essential to the last almost decade of my life.

Toben Nelson  42:09

I can reflect on that a bit. I think IRL is awesome and really difficult all at the same time. I think there were a lot of places where just exceptionally challenging for me personally. The thing that I’m most pleased about, I guess, was when those challenging times – when you’re facing those challenging times – and I think I learned this from IRL through IRL, leaning hard into your values and staying focused on the mission of what you’re trying to do, provides a really clear guidance. So when things seem challenging, when there’s hopelessness is creeping in, those values, and I think that for me, they existed prior to being involved in IRL, but I really firmly believe that [they] were strengthened through being involved in IRL, leading into those has been enormously helpful for me, personally, and I hope I have been able to uphold those values, exemplify those values, obviously, not always, but as as best I can, so that I feel good about

Cody Cotton  43:39

There’s a lot that can be said on this question, because Z and Tob, you all did an amazing job answering it, but I’m answering a little differently from my perspective. I’m 30 years old, and I’ve been blessed to be around some amazing leadership, a lot of PhDs, a lot of people who’ve had 20 to 30, even 40 to 50 years in the community doing this work. Yeah, I think about the speakers we brought in, like people who were really, just just really profound in their craft and being able to be around this. I think my number one goal is always seeing what way I could bring this back to my community, what ways I could help other small business, or community based organizations, to be able to have this advantage. Again, some people never even knew about a fellowship [at] my age, let alone had the opportunity to be a co director of one. So this impact has had on me. It allows me to show up more, not just show up more as a leader, but a leader of leaders. So I’m really thankful for this impact IRL has had on me.

Krystal Lee  44:44

Thank you all. I’m so grateful for the time that we spend together. We usually do a checkout question as we wrap up, so we check in with each other, and then we check out. So, as you all know, and we’ve, we’ve talked about over time, you know this work, the work towards health equity, the work against systems of oppression, it takes its toll, right? And Shawn Ginwright, in his book The Four Pivots, says that “… changing things that are broken in our society requires us to heal, both individually and collectively”. And so as a final thought, I want to invite you all to share with our listeners. How do you engage in self care as you engage in this work?

Cody Cotton  45:27

I listen first. I just try to listen to my body and listen to my heart… You know, it’s four seasons for a reason. Depending on the season we’re in, we may feel different. We may move different. We may receive things differently. So depending on the season I’m in, I’m trying to listen to my body. Sometimes I may need to lay in bed, stretched out, playing chess on my phone, but more times than not, I need to do something about it, get active and find out. Maybe it’s rest being in the community, and sometimes it’s just rest being with family. So more than anything, just try to listen to my body and find out what ways I could reset so I could keep this work going.

Zinzi Bailey  46:05

And I think I make sure that I have a lot of downtime. I try to rest, but I oftentimes, for me, that means going somewhere else, where I’m out of cell signal or Wi Fi signal, being able to reflect and take time and like actually being out. Yeah, Krystal being out. So I think that is helpful to reflect and actually know where I stand and how to come back refreshed and be able to, like, tap in and tap out. And I think that’s going to be essential for sustainability. So that’s kind of what I do. And I spend a lot of time with my family, being near or in water as much as possible.

Toben Nelson  47:01

For me, I’m not so sure I’m all that great at taking care of myself. I think a lot of folks may also feel similarly. I certainly can do better. I do appreciate the priority and the premium that that we as a collective have placed on self care in trying to do this work, I talked to my students about doing policy work in public health is a lot like banging your head against the wall, and you do need some rest and perspective and the ability to persist in doing that. And I think some self care is crucial to that. For me during IRL, I took a lot of walks in the woods with my dog, and I think some of that can bring some moments of peace and clarity, which are elusive sometimes. But the other thing I’ll say about this leadership team and also fellows in the program really value the mutual support that folks bring. I don’t feel like I would have made it through this, and I don’t think I would be here today without that. It’s enormously valuable to me, and when I reflect on my IRL experience, [I] think that mutual support has been absolutely critical, and I think that’s a theme for doing this work more broadly as well. I think that the extent to which we can continue to provide that for each other, treat each other as human beings with as much empathy as you can bring. I think those are recipes for success for all of us collectively.

Mandy LeBreche  48:48

Wow, that’s so good. Think we’re at a wrap here. So I just wanted to say thank you to you three, Cody Toben, Zinzi, for joining and talking to us today. We’re so grateful for hearing all your stories and experiences and perspectives with the IRL program over the last several years, and just a special thank you to each of you three. I think, individually and collectively, you three have poured so much just care and intentionality and love into the program, and you know, that’s why we’re here today. So thank you for joining us, and yeah, can’t wait for what’s to come next.

Krystal Lee  49:30

I echo what Mandy said. Thank you all so much for being with us, for sharing your experiences with shepherding the IRL program you know through the last several years. So thank you for being with us, and thank you to our listeners for being with us throughout this episode.

We want this to be a two way conversation, and so we would love to hear from you. Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we’ll post our show notes and any resources that we mentioned in this episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us today, and remember, we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time. 

Mandy LeBreche  50:24

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

A Conversation with Nancy Fishman

Season 1, Episode 4 | June 5, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee and Mandy LaBreche
• Guest: Nancy Fishman

Mandy LeBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity Podcast brought to you by the interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. 

Krystal Lee  00:21

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m your host, Krystal Lee, and I am so pleased that my co host today is Mandy LaBreche, Associate Director of Operations for IRL. Hey Mandy.

Mandy LaBreche

Hey Krystal.

Krystal Lee

Mandy. In our last episode, we talked with Luis Ortega of Storytellers for Change, about storytelling as a promising practice and as the foundation of this podcast. If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to go back and listen to Luis’s episode. We talk about the connection between stories and systems and how storytelling can be used as a tool for health equity. Today, we have the enormous privilege of talking with Nancy Fishman, former Program Officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). Hello, Nancy, and thank you for being here with us.

Nancy Fishman

Hi there. Happy to be here.

Krystal Lee

Nancy. We’re so grateful to have you with us. Before we get started and jump into our conversation. We just want to invite you to check in with us. So one of our core beliefs in IRL is that nurturing personal relationships is one key to building the kinds of communities that can collaborate effectively in the work towards health equity. So at the beginning of our meetings, what we usually do is a quick check in to help us to continuously build connections in our team and what we call our beloved community. So here’s our check in question for today. How are you feeling? Physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually? I can start so we can so I can model for you. So physically, I am feeling well. I’m feeling rested. I got some good sleep last night, which is kind of unusual for me. Intellectually, I am feeling super engaged, because I’m really looking forward to this conversation. And emotionally, I’m also feeling pretty engaged. And then spiritually. Just okay. Just okay. How about you? Mandy, how are you feeling today?

Mandy LeBreche  02:27

Yeah, I think across the PI, the E and the S, I’m feeling pretty good. I’m always like, striving for balance in my life. And I feel like, when I’m balanced, I don’t know, I just feel better in each of these elements. So, yeah, I’m always on this quest to, like, learn lifelong activities, particularly like sporting activities. So as Krystal, as you know, I learned how to swim. I took private swim lessons last fall, and just last week, I joined this, like beginners running club with a group of people from the Twin City. So yeah, I find that when I’m I don’t know, just like I’m an active, even hyperactive, type of person. So I find that physically, when I’m engaged and learning new things, honing new things, it helps the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual kind of fall into place. So Nancy, how about you?

Nancy Fishman  03:26

I’m good physically. I’ve been using some of my retirement time to keep healthy and physical. I am about to embark on a large trip tomorrow, so I’m pretty excited about learning lots of new things about a new culture, and I’m happy, but I’m a little nervous. I’m having that feeling. I’m also intellectually excited to have this conversation, because – this is good time to have a caveat. Some of the stuff we’re going to talk about today is 10 years, more than 10 years ago. So I have been getting it back in gear, and I’m excited to talk about that. And spiritually. You know, it’s always, it’s a journey, always, life. And so I’m on my way in more ways than one.

Mandy LeBreche  04:23

All right, Nancy, so you worked at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or RWJF in the Research Evaluation and Learning unit for 24 years. Can you tell us a little bit about your work with the foundation and about your role in creating the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program.

Nancy Fishman  04:42

Sure. When you work in the foundation, you do work on a variety of different topics. So I worked a lot in community health for the elderly and nursing workforce issues, which sort of led me more towards leadership issues. I worked, as you said, in the research and evaluation so we tried to learn either about a topic or about a program. We did research on topics that were important to the foundation, or we did evaluations of our existing programs. So I did both those things, and I spent many years in what we called our leadership group, thinking about ways to do leadership programs. And that brings me to IRL in around 2014 so right, as I said, we’re going back a ways. The foundation was embarking on our whole kind of new, not new, but articulating better what our mission was around a culture of health. And we, during that process, took a hard look at many of our leadership programs, because we had many. Individual leaders, whether it’s in research or clinical or community, and we decided to transform many of them and some that had been around for 40 years. So it was interesting and hard sometimes to make… change is hard. Change is hard on everyone. So it was kind of a hard time, but we did, after a lot of soul searching, getting input from a lot of people, we did come up with four different programs that we were going to concentrate on. They were going to be bigger than our other programs, and they were going to try to incorporate a bunch of different things. They were also going to be, and we’ll talk about this later, I think, too interdisciplinary in the sense that we had programs that were only for doctors or only for nurses, and we were not going to have any more of those programs. We were going to try to make sure, because we felt like the idea of intermingling all professions in health was going to be more helpful. So these programs, these four new programs, were designed and Interdisciplinary Research Leaders was one of them. It was really meant we had a bunch of different research programs going on, and this was the only research program in the bundle. The other ones were clinical, Clinical Scholars, and then a program for young scholars of diverse backgrounds, and then one for community leaders, and then this one for researchers and community leaders. And so that’s why we decided we needed to develop an IRL.

Mandy LeBreche  07:33

I love that. Can you share a little bit more about what the original vision for IRL was at the time this was all being developed, and if you don’t mind sharing a little bit about what your motivation and hopes for the program were at the time when it was just getting started or developed.

Nancy Fishman  07:53

So I knew we knew we wanted a research program. We wanted to support researchers, but we wanted to do it in a slightly different way. We had in the past, researchers who were in Research one institutions and pretty much ivory tower kind of feel they were doing the research, and they did excellent work, but it was kind of classic social science research, very various types, but still. So one of the things we knew we wanted to do is have things more community oriented. Then we started thinking, Well, of course, we want something sort of community, participatory research. And I then and again, this is an apologies, because it was 10 years ago, but we had, I spoke with you guys about this. We had somebody come and talk to us who was really a pioneer in community participatory research. And I left that meeting realizing, I said, Wow, we don’t want just to fund researchers. What we want to do is make sure that the people in the community are part of the program, so they get the leadership, they get the stipend, they’re really part of the team, and they’re not kind of a traditional where we give researchers money and they go out to the community, and that doesn’t always go so well. They don’t have the right insight, and I think we’ve learned so much over time in IRL about making that work.

So it was just an original thought that we wanted the community person on the team. We decided we definitely wanted a team of people again so we wouldn’t be stuck in an ivory tower. We would be, even if we were in an ivory tower, let me just say, we would be in a number of them, and that interplay would benefit everybody that there would be more give and take. And that’s not how we talk. We talk this way. And. Everybody has their own terms. So that’s really where we were. We knew we wanted a research program, and we knew we wanted something that was more community driven and that was leading more towards our thinking about the value, social value and culture of health. And of course, social determinants of health had become in 2014 all the rage as it should be. People were really understanding what you had to study. So we wanted to incorporate all those things. I will say we had, giving credit where credit is due. We had design firms come in. We funded, I don’t know how many design firms, and we gave them ideas. Oh, we want a research program. We want. We talked to them about what we wanted, and then they all came back with ideas. Some of them really outside the box. Oh, I wish I could remember one of them. It was really wild. It wasn’t for the research program. It was for one of the other programs had to do with, I think, making a TV show, it didn’t, in the end, work with what we wanted to do, but I just wanted to give an idea that we were kind of tried to incorporate new things and new ways of thinking. And so I did pull things from the design I got, mostly you guys will relate to this. The idea that we have a planning period so that we can really, I don’t know, six months. Is that what we use six month planning period, or whatever it is, and then it gets kind of shaped and approved and and moves on. And that was part of the design people, the idea and the also the idea of it, of course, being interdisciplinary, they agreed with that.

So, you know, we were trying to reach all sorts of people and get all sorts of ideas. And we had an advisory committee too. And then we wrote up our document calling for people to run these programs. Again, there were four programs. We sent it out, and you actually could, if you wanted to apply to all four. Not too many places did that, but some places applied to more than one, and went through the process. And then, of course, once we gave the grant, it was then we almost started the design over again, because there’s so many little things, every particular little question suddenly brings up a great big issue. For instance, what do we call the people, the community people? That guys are shaking your head, but they’re not community researchers. We didn’t want to put a researcher in that place. We wanted somebody who was head of a nonprofit, or whatever they were doing. I know when we wrote, I looked back at that piece of paper and it says community mentors. But I remember talking with Michael and Jan and just trying to figure out what other word we can use. You know, we just, I think, ended up with Team participants, and some of them are researchers, and some of them were community members. But even a little thing like that makes you step back and think, “Well, what is their role? And is it different? And you know, how do you value it?” And it made a difference. So anyway, of course, when we gave the grant to University of Minnesota, we almost, you don’t start again, but you start over, in a way.

Krystal Lee  13:31

Thanks for that context, Nancy, and I really appreciate the point that you made about like the what we call the people who are involved in this program because words matter. Words matter, and yeah, and so it’s, I think that’s an important lesson to take away for future efforts like this, you know, to be intentional about how we describe what we’re asking for, and who we want to participate, because we want people to be able to see themselves as part of the group that they’re being invited to be a part of, right? So let’s dig a little deeper into the into words. So what words mean? Interdisciplinary Research Leaders like, what were the intentions that you alluded to this earlier? But what were the intentions behind using the concepts of interdisciplinarity, research and leadership in creating this new program for the foundation. 

Nancy Fishman  14:28

Okay, we’ll start with leaders, because it was in this package of programs where we wanted to create cohort, a large cohort, of leaders who really understood health from the point of the community and social determinants of health and how to work with the community. And so that framework sat over all four programs, and so leaders that was part of what we want. We wanted people who could drive change, and most of the people we knew people – we weren’t inventing this, but we wanted to give people, still tools that they would be able to use in order to make change in their community and nation. And so that leadership, it was, was the big umbrella.

And research, as I mentioned, we wanted to have a bunch of different spokes on this wheel. One of them were community leaders. One of them was research leaders, student leaders. We wanted to get more now. That was our the student program. And then what’s Oh, clinical, our clinical, clinical leaders that were very similar in attitude, because they were also always interdisciplinary, but we wanted them to, of course, their what their research was was going to be a little different than what our research was in IRL. They didn’t always have to have a research program, but many of them did.

But anyway, so entered and then interdisciplinary for us, for like I said, just to compare to Clinical Scholars, that was mostly all clinicians, nurses, dietitians, pharmacists, doctors, of course, and all sorts of people joined that program, and that was the intent. And for ours, our past programs had very much been Social Sciences, which we still were, of course, very strong on. But the idea that we could expand that – we also wanted some people with medical, medical or nursing backgrounds in that would be fine. And we got them, I know we did, and our regular more social science and, of course, public health. Those are, like I said, social science, public health, those are the people we always funded. But we wanted to be able to make sure that we could tug on their experiences. And again, you know, just to expand everybody’s mind by throwing in a geography, a geographer, anthropologist, of course, I think we funded many anthropologists, actually, but a variety of other things for the tug and the pull of having those conversations, which always broadens your view. And so that’s what interdisciplinary it was very broad. 

We did require that they be a researcher, have research experience. This was not a program for brand new post doc researchers. This was people who had experience, but we wanted to somehow possibly change their frame a little bit to make it a little more community oriented, or just the experience. Maybe they were fabulous community researchers who had done lots of participatory, you know, community research, but maybe they hadn’t done it on the topics that we might choose, or maybe they hadn’t done it with, I’ll just say, a nurse. I do a lot of a nurse involved before, and they’re, you know, political science researchers, and so we wanted to make that kind of the thing. The thing I always would say about IRL, when we when it was hard, because it was always, you know, getting the teams to work together, and was hard. That was the work of IRL, that that was the whole point. The whole point was to get through that struggle.

Krystal Lee  18:19

Thanks for sharing. Nancy, I want to go back a little bit to something you mentioned earlier about a guest that you had at the foundation that really influenced the decision to incorporate the community in a different way than you had in the past. Could you talk a little bit about how, in thinking about IRL, how the community was a part of the conceptualization of the program, and what you hoped to come from that.

Nancy Fishman  18:48

I think we were aware, and I think possibly from this talk, but others of community based participatory research was out there and had been going on for years and years, but didn’t always go smoothly. Didn’t always end up answering the question the community really wanted. It often answered the question the researchers wanted to answer for the community. And so I think when we started to think about it. We thought, well, we there’s lots of experience with CBPR, but how is there a way to tweak it? And so I think that after hearing from people, particularly, you know, one talk, we were talking to somebody who had a lot of experience with this, it’s I thought, Well, part of the problem, I think, is that they have to be part of that the group from the beginning to to have the same agency as the researchers. Because, of course, all community based research, they came into the community and sat with people and they talked with people. I believe that, you know. Oh, that, of course, that happened, but then they went away, and they didn’t bring a community person with them to keep bugging them. And I kind of was thinking maybe, you know, you get that the community people have are, are going to be in every meeting and have the same kind of training. And one of the things I definitely brought from my work was actually my work in the nursing workforce, and that was to be able to have people who weren’t researchers. And it first dawned on me when I was working with a bunch of bedside nurses. But true for community nonprofit leaders also they have to be able to understand research well enough to use it like if they really, really understand it. So we did want an IRL. And I know, like I said, I in my past programs, I saw that as a nurse myself, I kind of understood that if you don’t have the agency or the knowledge to speak about data. You know, this person collects this data, but then you don’t use the right term, or you get mixed up, you know, you’re just not as impactful. So that was also it wasn’t just that we were going to use the community members because to answer the correct questions, we wanted to leave them with the ability to use the research.

Mandy LeBreche  21:23

I just have a quick follow up, Nancy, I liked how you talked about in one of your earlier answers, just the push and pull, the struggle and the joy of three people coming together to do this community engaged project and work together throughout three years of this fellowship program, and I feel like we’ve heard throughout the whole program, just why is there two researchers and only one community partner? So I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit more in terms of the development of of IRL and how, yeah, all you all arrived at three people, two researchers, one community partner, because I feel like that has been an ongoing thing… strategic, I guess, is just that the imbalance and and researchers and and community leaders.

Nancy Fishman  22:17

Yeah, totally, that’s a good question. And that is a question that we, I recall, and Mandy, you might have been part of those conversations early on, that when, as I said, after Minnesota got the grant, there was still another whole design from and we could have been free to do it that way, but it’s, I mean, I say this, but it is a money thing. We would have to have decreased the number of teams greatly to balance it. And I want, and I think we felt, the foundation felt pretty strongly that there had to be at least two researchers, because can’t be interdisciplinary if you only have one. And remember, in this umbrella of programs, this was the research program. We had a whole ‘nother program that had teams of community leaders, and they came together as a team to do a community project. And so yes, there’s that push and pull, and I know it was difficult, and there was definitely some power struggle there, and I know as time went on, an interesting part was who got the grant? And that’s the whole and I have to say, this is all stuff we were learning too, right? We were all learning this together. Who got the grant made a big difference. The amount of care that a community person needs is different than a researcher. The amount of care a community person needs working at a small nonprofit, I should say, is different than the amount of care a researcher needs working at a great, big, giant institution, although I don’t mean they don’t need care. They just need different things, and it comes to and and the power tug too. So ideally, I suppose it would have been fun to have four people on every team too, and that would have been nice. And I think that would have decreased the teams a lot. I have to say. It just comes back to our umbrella, thinking of this as a research program and money, because we only have so much money. We had a lot of money, but we didn’t have enough money to do everything. Do you think if, as you talked to teams over the years, that would have been a better choice overall to do maybe two and two. You hear it enough in the last three or four cohorts that I wasn’t involved in.

Mandy LeBreche  24:47

Yeah, that’s such a good question. I think I do probably think overall, having two and two could have been better, but I’m sure it also would present itself with different challenges than the two in one approach. There’s no perfect solution there. When I think back, like the tension that we saw in the relationships of all these three person teams, it’s not always between community and researchers. I feel like we see a good amount of tension among the two researchers. So I don’t know, yeah, it’s hard to say. I think maybe would have been a little better. But then, as you said, it would have been, it would have meant funding fewer teams, and, you know, fewer individuals overall.

Nancy Fishman  25:35

We learned so, so much in this program, I think, and about this very specific thing that you know about how teams work, and that’s it’s all learning. But some of it was, we didn’t anticipate a lot of it. We really didn’t. We didn’t understand how much of that of the struggle, as I said before, as we went on, in the first couple years, they started to think IRL that the team building is the work of the program, meaning it’s you’re learning that people are growing, probably more from that than certainly their research skills, because other researchers already had those skills, and the community members can learn research skills. That’s not that hard. What’s hard is learning how to work together in that group.

26:25

Yeah, absolutely.

Krystal Lee  26:26

So you mentioned, like, this is a it was a continuous process of learning, and you learned so much, and there were things that you didn’t think about in the beginning that emerged over time. And I just wonder, in terms of thinking about the evolution of the program while you were with the foundation, and while you were working with IRL with the benefit of hindsight, like, what does that evolution look like, and what would you describe as the impact that IRL has had in moving us towards health equity?

Nancy Fishman  26:55

Well, the thing that came to my mind first is totally about equity, and that is understanding that a community participant in this research team needed different things and in order to do and you know, isn’t that really equity in order to be at the team in the same way that people who are supported from different organizations needed, needed different things. In the end, I know I’ve checked with talking with you too, just recently, I did check that that continued, but we did not think about, I have to, I’m just going to say we didn’t think about the fact that when you pull community person from their nonprofit, which is what a lot of the community people came from, that leaves a big hole, and that organization suffers. And I think we just didn’t think about that hard enough. And isn’t that what really equity is all about, like, understanding what every person needs to be at the same level. And so I think the foundation learned that was a great that’s great for all of us, that lesson. So I think that that’s probably one of the big lessons. I mean, I think the other big lesson is the work of getting the question right, the research question right, the project question right, whatever you want to call it. So that it met the needs of the community in a real way. And that was very difficult because, of course, when we funded these teams they came up with their project, their research, and they had done some digging, the three of them together, but not a lot. And so it could be that when they talked with the community, and I kind of remember one in particular, the community had a whole different set of needs. They really didn’t even care about this project. So isn’t that also equity? Because that’s if this is about a community broad, about helping building a culture of health in a place, isn’t it about getting that correct too. So you serve the needs of the community in a way that you when that they need, and not the way you think they need. So that was the second big way that I feel that we learned more. We knew that was going to be I mean, I think anybody who’s done community knew that would be an issue, but I you know, we just didn’t always know how much of a we were able to build that in, which is why I think some teams were more successful than others, but even those who weren’t as successful getting their program off the ground were successful in building and learning from that experience.

Mandy LeBreche  29:59

So I guess now that you shared some of your bigger lessons learned from your time as program officer for IRL Nancy, if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? Or is there anything you would do differently?

Nancy Fishman  30:17

Well, if I knew all that I know now, I would still have the same National Program Office, that’s for sure. You guys did such a phenomenal job in bending and learning and implementing all the changes. I constantly commend you for doing that, and all the many changes like life happens as we go through too and so that was great. But I think that I would, I would know so much more about what the community members of the team needed, but I would also, I think we started out, everybody was so excited our first couple cohorts, people were so excited to be part of it, and it was a real joy to have them, but we didn’t really know, even the researchers, what level of research acumen they would have, and it varied quite a bit over the years. And I know Krystal’s shaking her head like she knows, so I don’t know that you could prevent that, but I think we could definitely have anticipated that. Anticipated the wide variety of professional experience, along with personal experience everybody brought in. And of course, as we said, The thing about supporting, the nonprofits that the community people were being pulled from; that totally could have been done right up front, and we just didn’t realize so I think those are the kind of – you learn every time you do a big meeting, too. Mandy, you wouldn’t know that, and I didn’t well know me. I just showed up. I was lucky enough to have this great team, but we always debriefed and knew what worked and what didn’t. So of course, anytime you go into a meeting now, your meetings are probably different than they were when we started. So that’s hard to say. I would do differently, because you don’t really, you don’t really know what you’re going to get. But I think that it would be around our community members and more flexibility for the researchers and expanding or building on what they already – their expertise in research and expanding it without rehashing things they already were well aware of. You know, it was very hard to know, so it’d almost have to be an Individual Learning Plan, because I recall the first couple meetings, we were trying to go over things, and some people were fascinated, and some people were like, I could teach this. I’m sure you run into that to this day. Knowing that in advance, but thinking that through we were – we, meaning University of Minnesota and and people at the Foundation who are supporting me, as we always say, we’re creating the plane as we flew it, because the foundation was very devoted to getting these programs going. Because we had stopped so many of our leadership programs; I believe we closed 10 of them. It was life altering for all of us to have to go through that process. So we were just like, we have to let the field know and the world know we are not walking away from these kind of programs. We were just changing them. So we put a lot of pressure on our new programs to make it move fast. And of course, I would say, if we didn’t have to do that, that would have been grand, but we didn’t do it that way, so we put a lot of pressure to keep them moving, which then caused us to have a rough start. Yeah, I don’t know the rest of like I said, everybody, the participants, were all so happy to be there, and I think they had good, good experiences. Our first cohort, particularly, they loved being Guinea kid pigs, but I think that they would have been nice if we’d had a little more time to develop and test a few things.

Krystal Lee  34:11

All of that makes so much sense to me, especially from a curriculum standpoint. One of the first things that you would do as far as, like, learn about your learner. Yeah, see what they’re already bringing with them and what they need, and then make that plan moving forward, make the plan for them, for what you will teach them, or what you will have them do to build upon that. So in that, that makes sense to me as a lesson learned. I think that’s good. Thanks for highlighting that. I wonder, Nancy, if you could tell us about what’s, what do you think IRL legacy will be when you think about the growth of the program, like, are there things that you are … What are some of the things that you are most proud of about the program?

Nancy Fishman  34:52

Well, I am enormously proud that this program had all those cohorts, and there are all those people out there. What is the final number, Mandy?

Mandy LaBreche  35:02

I think it’s 297 fellows.

Nancy Fishman  35:04

Wow, so isn’t that you should you should all feel really proud about that, that they’re out there, that have, they’ve had this experience, and all the things that we just talked about, so that they have skills that they didn’t have. They come and they can continue to apply them and continue to speak for health equity in their institutions. I know one of the we didn’t talk about this, but I’ll turn to this right now. I do recall that the researchers themselves spent time talking about bringing this kind of knowledge into the ivory tower, as we were, I keep pointing over here as if I have an ivory tower in the corner of my room, and it was hard sometimes because it wasn’t valued in the same way. Let’s not ignore the fact that we’re going through tough times as a nation. And so I think they are going to have skills that will be very necessary. Of course, our community members will also and as I said, hopefully have skills in working with researchers and just using information and knowing what real science is. So I think that those things are important. And I do believe that the lessons we learned as a foundation, we continue to have research programs that aren’t called leadership programs. They’re more on the research side. And I can’t really speak to many of them because I’m no longer at the foundation. However, I do know that they’re very much more engaged with community in different ways, but and I think the legacy and the hard work of IRL is getting those three people together and having them work, and it was unique, but I think it’s really valuable in some of the lessons we learned were valuable for that too.

Mandy LeBreche  36:58

All right. Nancy, one, last question before we wrap up. It’s kind of a biggie, but I think it’s important for our current time. What do you think is the role of the private sector and philanthropists like RWJF and driving health equity in the current political climate?

Nancy Fishman  37:21

Well, again, and maybe I should have said this earlier, because I don’t work at the foundation anymore, so I don’t speak for the foundation. However, having been there for 24 years, I feel like it’s in my blood. And I do know you can see by the work and what they’ve put out there that they’re moving forward, and I think moving forward with the work that needs to be done to improve the health of the nation, and that includes addressing disparities and improving health equity and promoting science that as real science that we know. And so I think the role of those people, particularly foundations, who aren’t do not get money from federal government or state is to keep on, keeping on, as they say, and I believe that is what the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is doing, is to continue to promote the needs of the people in this country, and as many, hopefully as many private other private sectors, I’m quite sure you all would feel this way too, that the nonprofit world out there, although they will be impacted if there’s pullbacks on money from various points, will continue the work to address the needs in their communities and and help lift up the stories of those in need and the what health equity really means. And I think that their struggle is going to be much bigger. And so the role of foundations will be, of course, to continue to help that. As you both know, the purse of a foundation is nowhere, nowhere near what the federal government is. So it’s not as though all the foundations out there can step up and replace it. So there has to be other ways. But I think that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is holding its own, and going forward with the work that it’s already said is important.

Mandy LeBreche  39:28

Thanks for that. All right, I lied. There’s technically one more question, but it’s like our checkout question, okay, we know that working towards equity, and again, systems of oppression can take its toll. And in her book emergent strategy, adrienne maree brown encourages us to and I quote her, “…grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for”. So as a final thought, can you share with our listeners how you engage in self care as you continue to do this work,

Nancy Fishman  40:05

That’s really hard. It’s really hard right now, self care is really hard, and I wake up in the morning and read too much bad news before I get going. But I, since I retired, what I’m mostly doing outside of the house is volunteer work. So it I think that’s what we all have to do, is to do more. So my self care is action. I think that that makes me feel better. I’m not very good at meditating, which I should do after I do my readings in the morning of various people and newsletters. I should meditate then it would help my whole day, but I don’t. But I do go out and do a couple different things in our community, and that helps me feel better and keep moving. And so I think action helps me with self care more than you might think. And I’m sure meditation would help too, but I don’t do it. I do exercise, though, that helps.

Mandy LeBreche  41:01

Yep, you’re checking off the boxes there. Yeah, into meditation at some point. I’m not a big meditator either, even though I do know it would benefit me beautifully. Yeah, Nancy we were so glad that you could spend the time with us today. It was great, great, to see you. It’s been so many years, and yeah, you felt like it was just back to five years ago when I joined the Zoom meeting and saw you.

Nancy Fishman  41:29

I know! I don’t know you guys, I hope that I articulated something I don’t know or didn’t. So it was fun. It’s fun to revisit this. I’m really proud of this program, and it feels really, really good to be able to put a little cap on it.

Krystal Lee  41:44

Thank you Nancy, and thank you to our listeners, as always, we want this to be a two way conversation, so we would love to hear from you, what promising practices are you using in your work to achieve health equity. Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we will also share our show notes and some of the resources discussed in this episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us today, and remember, where all of this journey together and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world, until next time…

Mandy LeBreche  42:32

Promising Practices for health equity is produced by the interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners, for being a part of this important conversation.

A Conversation Between IRL’s Original Co-Directors: Jan Malcolm and Michael Oakes

Season 1, Episode 3 | May 22, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee
• Guests: Jan Malcolm and Michale Oakes

Krystal Lee  00:00

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the interdisciplinary research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I am your host. Krystal Lee. In our first two episodes, we introduced the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program (IRL) and talk about the reason for doing this podcast, our primary goal is to share lessons learned from our IRL experiences, which we conceptualize as promising practices for health equity. Promising practices are activities, procedures, approaches, policies or techniques that have shown positive results in our work with IRL. Episode Two delves into the practice of storytelling as a promising practice for health equity and introduces some of the frameworks that we will use to share our lessons learned through the stories of people who have been involved in IRL over the past 10 years. My co-hosts and I are your guides throughout this journey. Today’s episode, though, is a little different than usual. We’re sharing a podcast recording from 2020 prior to the COVID 19 pandemic. It’s a conversation between the two original co directors of the IRL program, Dr Michael Oakes and Jan Malcolm. In their conversation, they talk about their intentions for IRL, how IRL connects research evidence with community activism and their hopes for the impacts that IRL could make. Have a listen.

Jan Malcolm  01:36

So, was at Alina, and Ira Moskovice, whom I’ve  known over the years, called me one day and said, I want you to come to lunch. There’s this great opportunity that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is launching. And I really, I really think you need to know about it, and you should be talking with us about it. So I never turned down an invitation to lunch, especially with people I admire. So we met, as I recall, as a hot summer day sitting outside on the patio at the campus club, and we had never met. And Ira just said, the two of you need to do this. You need to write the RFP and get us this opportunity to stand up a new, very different kind of leadership development program. And I think neither one of us quite knew what we were getting into, but…

Michael Oakes  02:29

…or each other, but I right. Look, I’ll share from my side, I was working as a Professor of Public Health on Social Determinants of Health from an epidemiology perspective, what drives health outcomes from a almost a social science perspective, and spent, you know, a couple decades doing that and a little bit of success, but also began be frustrated. I can show all the differences, the disparities and the problems. What’s the solution? And over time, I wanted more and more solution orientation, and I was working on a grant for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a typical professor’s Sunday afternoon, and Ira called me. Professor Moscovice called me and said, Let’s have lunch. I want to talk to you about a grant opportunity. And I said, Great, assuming he was talking about the one I was working on. So he and I and a couple others were chit chatting at lunch, and I said, “Whoa, I think we’re talking about different things”. And in fact, we were. he had known about this forthcoming request for applications for a major shift from the red boy Johnson foundation to build this thing that we now call Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, and we were talking, a small group of us to lead the application in. And I said, “This looks great. It’s right up my alley. Who should lead it?” And he said, “You should”. And I, of course, I had a surge of anxiety. And then he said, Let’s talk with my friend Jan. We had lunch, and I we’ve been off the races since.

Jan Malcolm  03:59

Yeah, it was such a great, a great opportunity, and being a part of that team to write the application, and when the site visit team came, you know, and we were able to show we are really serious about a partnership between academia and the community. I think the genuineness of that commitment on the university’s part to to really partner with community leaders was very evident. And I think I know how shocked you were and I was that we actually won the award. I remember you calling me. I think you were on, you’re on a canoe trip  and you got the call, yep, and you’re, you know, I thought you’re calling to say, you know, because it was hot, we competed. We knew that. Thought you’re going to say, you know, “thanks for the effort. Didn’t get it was still great. Good work. Thanks. Bye”, instead, you know, very kind of low key tone of voice. I thought, you know, for the first 10 seconds of the call, I thought, “Oh, for sure, he’s just calling to let me down easy”. And then you just said, “Yeah, well, we got it”.

Michael Oakes  05:01

now. What now? Careful what you wish for, right? And so that was the beginning of the IRL program about five years ago, the moment of this recording. And so share with the group. Share with me what your initial thoughts of what our mission was, from your perspective back then, of course.

Jan Malcolm  05:18

Yeah, well it just was so right on in my mind, the and you said it too, the abundance of evidence that we have been accumulating about the fact of health inequities, the fact of poor outcomes at individual and community levels, about how to move the needle. You know, what were really the levers, and how were we going to make more change? And the idea of partnering rigorous research with community activism and training the researchers to be activists, and training the activists to understand and use research, just seemed to me to be so right on, because that’s, that’s what’s missing, is that is that bridge between you know, the academics, who you know, if, if they’re not engaged, and rewarded for what actually is done with their research, but it’s just research for its own sake, research for the next grant. Then, you know, there we’re missing their power in helping to be change agents and community activists. Can have all the passion in the world, but if they don’t have the evidence, it’s certainly hard to make things happen in the real world climate where everybody doesn’t agree on what the problem is or what the solutions are. So this idea of activism plus evidence just seems right on. Seems so then, and it’s certainly born out.

Michael Oakes  06:46

Yeah, no, I agree, obviously, completely. And I think there’s even more to this story that I’ve learned in the ensuing five years, one while many academics, and certainly not all, need to be but those interested in doing this engaged, action oriented work, want to do it. Want to pursue it. Institutions, big research universities, especially, don’t give a lot of incentive, in fact, to actually poo poo this kind of work for the more junior faculty, which makes it all the more problems. So not only try and change systems, you know, in the sort of real world, as you might say, helping people live more healthy lives, but also the nature of the industry of modern scientific, public health oriented research, that has to change as well. It’s been one of the more interesting, challenging and exciting aspects for me, is, how do we change incentive structures? Lift up the people doing the good work in the community, instead of only those, and this isn’t to say it’s all that matters, but instead of only those doing the research of more basic science, which is obviously critically important, but I would like to have a bigger tent, so more people can be engaged in this stuff and be supported the universities, so that the authentic engagement, which we’ll talk about takes a lot of time. It’s relationship building and trust building. And Lord knows, there’s been reasons to not trust. How do you support faculty and faculty like persons in that work, and simultaneously lift up their community leaders to appreciate the research, as you say, to gather the evidence, and frankly, going back to some of your roots, which is so fascinating to me, to appreciate the ethical areas of that from informed consent to what? Why are you asking this research question of the community and all kinds of things like that? So we’re trying to change systems, I think, as much as anything else.

Jan Malcolm  08:38

Yeah. that’s really well said, Michael, and your last point there, you know what? What is ethical research, and how do you engage the community? But also, the power of IRL, to me, was elevating community voice and defining what even is the question because we think we know what the question is, but if it’s not relevant to the community, we’re gonna we’re gonna miss it. And so much of our traditional public health work has not been truly community engaged and it still isn’t, to this day. It’s because it’s darn hard. You mentioned the time it takes to do genuine community engagement, and it’s true, and you often don’t have funding for that, and don’t have time for that, and the legislature gives you six months to stand up a program and six more months to produce data out of it, and it’s really hard to do really community engaged work under those traditional constraints.

Michael Oakes  09:32

Say a little bit about the engaged work, the efforts, and frankly, the barriers to engaged work that you see in the Minnesota Department of Health. What are you seeing as the lead of that group?

Jan Malcolm  09:41

Well, it certainly is time pressure. But you also mentioned the very valid gap, the chasm of lack of trust between the communities and the public health system that’s trying to serve those communities and work with the communities. And partly it’s that, that notion that we’re the experts, we know, you know, we know, clearly, look at the data, we know what the issue is here. You know. We may not know why or what the solution is, but by gosh, we know what’s the problem. And we, that’s been our tendency to come out of our, you know, our well intentioned we want the right outcomes. But we, we think we we know all that we need to know about what what the issues are, and the fact that community engagement can be translated to mean, well, we just pull together an advisory group and we ask for some input, and we say, thank you very much, and we go away and we design the program and roll it out and think that we’ve gotten community input in that that’s so much more than that in genuine community engagement means you’re actually gonna involve the community in making the decision about, what did that data mean, and what should we do with it, and that too. I mean that will not only takes time, but the ability to kind of share the power of making the decision, whether it’s about how the grant gets distributed or what the evaluation measures are, is hard in any case, but particularly when you’ve got, you know, the legislature literally looking over your shoulder saying, How are you spending that money? And why did you do it this way instead of that way? Because the legislature also thinks they know what the answer is, right.

Michael Oakes  11:25

And I imagine there’s a tension you see as commissioner, what we might call deep prevention, working with communities on foundational issues such as housing and education and other aspects of social life, versus more nurses, more N-95 masks in pandemic regions, things like this. How do you navigate that with respect to the policy makers, the decision makers, and frankly, the community members who put them in office or not?

Jan Malcolm  11:55

Yeah, well, I do, I think I said at the very outset, I think I’m optimistic, because the conversation is opening up among policy makers and among sectors of the community to understand the power of the social determinants framework and the, you know, kind of the common sense once you get past the you know, high falutin rhetoric that, of course, transportation matters to to health outcomes, economic development is, you know, probably one of the most powerful tools we Have to go way, way upstream to give people the access and the resources to to make healthier decisions and getting out of this, you said it before, getting out of this narrow frame of individuals just need to make healthier choices. Yes, they do, but we collectively have a job to do to make sure that, though, that they have real access to better choices that they have, you know, access to opportunity and beginning to sort of get more more quantifiable evidence of the difference that, for instance, housing makes to health outcomes or educational outcomes in health. I mean, some of that data has been growing for years, but that’s what I’m really eager to see more of out of these Robert Wood Johnson programs, is, what do we know about those cross sector effects? And is there a multiplier effect? You know, when you get multiple determinants working, you know, working together at once.

Michael Oakes  13:23

What are the barriers you’re encountering as a leader in this area to getting more of this done? Is it understanding? Is it pure politics? I’m just curious.

Jan Malcolm  13:32

I think the understanding is dawning, because it really there is a common sense to it when you start to explain and we what we’re doing, a lot of work at the health department with community partners on narrative, you know, how do we even describe the relationship between housing and health, or education and health, in giving people just ways to describe it and talk about it, that that helped to broaden that perspective. So the understanding is growing what what is now challenging is okay, now you’ve painted a picture that all of this stuff is connected to everything else. Where do we start? Because we can’t do it all. And how do you do it? And how do you do it? So where do you start? How do you start to build some momentum? Because, you know, that’s a frustration for I think us true believers in social determinants, when we’re told, pick the one thing we say, you can’t it’s all related. We have to do all of it, but we can’t do all of it.

Michael Oakes  14:26

No, there’s scarcity, right? Yeah. And so I imagine you might want to improve, let’s just say early child education or housing, right for the citizens of Minnesota. And I know you think beyond that, but your current job is focused there. You don’t have unlimited budget, and you have many competing demands. How does a leader such as you decide and what’s the role of evidence in that decision making process?

Jan Malcolm  14:47

Oh, I wish, I so wish that there was more evidence that could actually guide prioritization, because that is really, really where we’re hurting, I think, because everything we do has a constituency, and it came from somewhere and somebody’s passionate about it. So we can’t afford to say we can’t ever do anything new until we get new money, because that is not going to be the answer. So we have to be able to reallocate resources and decide, what can we do that is more powerful or further upstream, more aimed at closing the equity gaps? And the evidence is not yet powerful enough to help us say, Well, clearly this is more powerful than that, so it does become a more of a struggle of what is the constituency that is able to help push for that?

Michael Oakes  15:42

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ll say, from my perspective, as limited as it is, I think it’s a failure of the research side. I’ve been involved in research my whole career. I, you know, review and sometimes get NIH grants and other things. I’m always struck when colleagues and even myself write things like. This Research will be beneficial for policy decisions, but there’s hardly ever evidence that that’s true. Like, which commissioners of health Did you talk to, which CEOs, which governors, which community leaders did you talk to who said we need this evidence to move the ball forward? In my experience, inside the academy, in the research world, that’s very rarely done instead, generally, ideas are picked up and pushed forward from what someone else did, or some interesting idea one might have in the shower in the morning, and that’s a cool research project I’ll apply to get money and push it forward, and then my outcome will be a peer reviewed publication which is clearly important, but not usually sufficient for driving the evidence base for people like you making decisions about how to allocate government resources to improve the public health, I so wish, and one of the, as you know, the missions of IRL, is to help researchers. There’s many missions, of course, but one of them is to help researchers think about, oh, I have an interesting idea. I wonder if Commissioner of Health in Alabama would like to have that information to change her or his decision making. Doing that, I would hope my my hope is that would change the research questions asked, the methods to collect and analyze the data, and, of course, the dissemination of the same that’s sort of the research vision side. There’s more to it for the IRL program that we’re trying to cultivate.

Jan Malcolm  17:37

I think that’s that. It’s just critically important. And I think again, there’s a moment here that, certainly in Minnesota, and I know other states as well are really trying to work on more evidence based policy making. There’s this Results First Initiative going on around the country that I believe the Pew Foundation has been pretty instrumental in. We’re working on that here in Minnesota, there’s a whole team at the Management and Budget Office agency, and they are tasked and funded by the legislature to do these sort of meta analyses of what do we know about the impact of a whole bunch of programs? And they’ve they’ve tended to work in corrections and social services and and they’re dipping their toe into public health, and it’s great, and it makes us nervous, because what is the kind of, what’s the mental model of how you how you evaluate stuff, you know, where are you looking for the effects? Are you only looking for the effects of the public health interventions in, you know, clinical measures in six months or a year or two years, that the time frame and the ability to look at effects, you know, secondary effects, or whatever they call them, that don’t count in the traditional way of of evaluation. So if researchers who care about this subject matter can help, you know, can help inform the folks who the legislature is now looking to to help, you know, advise their decisions. There’s a real opportunity there, because this conversation about how do we measure results is really picking up steam in a lot of legislators around the country.

Michael Oakes  19:22

It’s fascinating to me. I know a history of some of this. I studied with the great program evaluator, Peter Rossi and in the 1960s and 70s, the country was working on major social programs coming out of the Johnson administration and so forth, and evaluators were working on, does this work or this not work? And this continues today. What I see today is thinking about evaluation in a more, smaller way. That is not only the huge multi million dollar programs, but the smaller ones. So the evidence base is richer. Does my community organization work with children in school? Is that effective? Or should I use my scarce resources elsewhere? That is, there’s a whole range now of things, and you’re so right. I mean, this is where, I think, hopefully, the professional researchers can help. What are we measuring? How are we measuring it? Who’s involved? And, you know, obviously, what are the ethics there? Becomes super slippery, and it just takes experience to know where the land mines are.

Jan Malcolm  20:27

Right. And to your earlier example of looking for who, who might really use the work that we’re trying to do in that intersection between research and and community change agents, who are the people that we’re trying to help or influence with that work, and to really get their perspective on what the questions are right, right up front there, I’ll just tell you quick, powerful, I think, really powerful story. So we’re doing this, all this results, first work in Minnesota, and when it comes to, you know, a point that I tried to hammer a lot with the legislature last year. And now is being picked up, I think, really seriously, by MMB. Is, is this very notion of, well, okay, so some of our traditional research framework just doesn’t even fit some of the populations experiencing the greatest disparities, because there is no evidence that’s specific to them. And sometimes the evaluation framework itself just is way off point, and we’re the Walz-Flanagan administration of Minnesota is putting a huge priority on working differently and better and more collaboratively with the sovereign Native nations in our state. And so there’s a whole effort now to say this results first framework that we care so much about in Minnesota does not fit the native nations’ experience, their wisdom, their way of evaluating. So rather than just have a caveat, you know, does not apply, or should be, you know, should be tweaked this way or that way, the results first team is working with the Native nations to build an entirely different framework that’s based on indigenous ways of evaluating. And it’s, I just want to stand up and applaud. It’s like, Yay, you know, rather than Well, let’s see how we can fit you into our box. What’s, you know, what’s, what’s a better box?

Michael Oakes  22:17

Or let’s go in and study you, extract what we want, take out what we need, and then leave you to fend for yourself. That’s the cartoon, but sometimes all too real evaluation or research model that we’ve seen. Let’s stick with this conversation for a minute about Native Americans and sovereign tribes, and talk a little bit about equity, diversity, inclusion. How are you understanding this in your role and obviously your career? I know you’re deeply dedicated to the area, but share a few thoughts, if you would, about EDI issues and challenges to improve lives for people who’ve been marginalized, people who haven’t had all the advantages that some of us had.

Jan Malcolm  22:58

Yeah, boy, it’s such a multi-layered question and conversation. But, you know, I think the conversation really continues to evolve. We used to say, Well, we, you know, our top job is to measure disparities, you know, and to and to say that demonstrates our, our, you know, awareness of diversity and equity, by saying, well, here’s, here’s the gap. What though that didn’t do never, never has done is probed deeply enough into what really produces those differences. It’s not just documenting the differences, it’s understanding why does that happen, and the good public health thinking, you know, keep going upstream, upstream, upstream for what are some of those causes? What? What we’ve really adopted at the Minnesota Department of Health is a view that what causes health inequities are gaps in opportunity, inequitable distribution of opportunity. Yeah, and, and that, that really, you know, again, takes us right back into the realm of social determinants and economic development in specific that I think has more to do with understanding the roots of inequity and what it will take to create equitable opportunity, rather than just, you know, concerning ourselves with differential access to care or differential quality outcomes within that narrow clinical slice. Again, as you said earlier, necessary but not sufficient.

Michael Oakes  24:29

Yeah, it’s interesting. I see this on the research side, where many really brilliant, insightful researchers will study, historically, the causes of inequity, redlining, obviously near genocide for Native Americans and so forth. Really important work. But in our framework that we are talking about that’s important to know, understand the history, but what can we do today? I think people need real solutions to have more opportunities to live healthier lives today and going forward. And I think that’s an area that the IRL research community, we’re trying to get to. Scholarship can be so easily focused on what happened in the past, important, but we’re trying to offer solutions to health commissioners and governors. We need things about what can we do and in a feasible policy space in our divided America.

Jan Malcolm  25:17

And it’s a great example, I think so. Understanding the truth of intergenerational trauma, historical oppression, how that translates today into different exposures to ACES and other things, and then the solutions are more community tailored approaches to resilience, or to to work in a trauma informed way, or to try to build resilience in ways that are more culturally based and that are designed by the communities themselves.

Michael Oakes  25:48

Yeah, I think that’s right. I’ll just say from my more research side, it’s not just about doing research differently. It’s about different researchers in the conversation, bringing people from sovereign nations and African Americans and so forth into the discussion of the cutting edge of research. That’s also what we’re trying to do here.

Jan Malcolm  26:08

Which goes, I think, to the importance of inclusion. Inclusion, as you said, it’s understanding. What does equity even mean? You know, diversity, so that’s, we’ve been focused there, like, well, let’s make the workforce more diverse, good idea, but also not sufficient, unless you can retain and grow that workforce through inclusion. You know, we can, we can attract a more diverse community of public health workers, but are they going to grow into the public health leaders that are going to be the ones making the decisions in the future? Which goes right to, you know, the the inclusion part of it, it’s like, what does it take to build a culture in an organization or community that really, truly values a broad range of experiences, and it gets as wonky and nerdy as your hiring criteria, the way you write minimum job specs, and all of us work in different institutions with different rules. But so we have to have a really challenging conversation about challenging the way we, you know, write minimum job qualifications in order to make sure that we’re we’re valuing different kinds of experience, and not just, you know, the the traditional way of saying I need x years of this and this kind of a degree. Yes, you need that technical skill. But how are you going to develop and and really grow an inclusive group of future leaders if you’re, if your pipeline is not more open earlier on?

Michael Oakes  27:46

Yeah, I agree. Obviously the rubber hits the road at some point, often in the hiring decisions, in the promotion decisions that leaders in your organizations and mine making every day. Let’s talk for a few minutes about leadership. You’re a very prominent leader. I know you’ll blush when I say that, but you’ve done tremendous things. Tell me about your leadership training and your views on what makes a good leader?

Jan Malcolm  28:08

Wow. Well, it’s actually a topic quite near and dear to my heart, because I have had the privilege of being in leadership roles for much of my career, but I’ve always wondered, you know, am I taking full advantage of the opportunity, and what does it take to really be a good leader? So Sure you can, to some degree, you are declared a leader by the position that you’re in, but whether you really are viewed as a leader is a different question. I think we, we all have examples of that in our personal and professional and civic lives, that we see people who are in these positions of leadership who really are not leading in the sense of helping their organization, their community, whatever, make progress toward, you know, something compelling. And to me, that leadership is about supporting, you know, the capacity of a group of people to do something big, something big that they care about. And it’s supporting, but it’s also kind of a combination of push and pull and and, as I said at the outset, cheerlead and critique, but to try to really motivate, enable, harness the energies of a group of people to achieve something big that that they couldn’t do just by themselves. So at the health department, we are blessed, and I’m sure this is true of many health departments across the country, but such passionate people in public health, I mean, motivated to, you know, literally protect the health of the public, and driven by a desire to do as well as we possibly can. But the things we’ve been talking about at this hour, you know, the limits to what we traditionally have done and known. And we’ve been working on health equity, for example, at Minnesota Department of Health for decades. And it’s sobering, you know, when we see the relatively little progress we’ve made on really closing the gaps in health opportunity and health outcomes that we know are there. So challenging ourselves to think differently is just an example of what I mean by leadership. So you could just sort of celebrate the fact that we’ve got technically excellent people and programs and where, you know, we get a lot of rewards for doing what we do today, but are we making as much difference as we can, you know, for the future is the, is the leadership question and opportunity. So, I do think you know, and sort of back to your, your question about, what is the leadership development journey first, I think it’s, it’s just so wonderful that we’re developing, you know, more scholarship too, around leadership. What, what is it? And how does one get better at it? Because it isn’t just conferred upon you. You know, my own, you know, my own journey has been one more of just trial and error and trying to figure out, well, that worked and that didn’t, and why. And so I really applaud the commitment of people who are interested in this question of, how do you be a better leader and invest the time in studying it? Because there is a body of work emerging that we can draw on. Plug your book. Well, you know, it’s, I wrote a book with Jim Begun, another great guy from the University of Minnesota, and someday, maybe I’ll I don’t know if I can persuade Jim to rewrite it, because he might. I know he’s moved on to many other topics, but it needs some refreshing for sure. But we, we really did kind of developed this, this notion, you know, that it’s useful to break down the concepts, you know, because leadership’s an easy term to throw around, but it’s like, what are the what are the values, the the beliefs, the values, the traits, but then the the actual hardcore knowledge and the behaviors and the in the skills that that come together to really equip one to handle the kind of the kinds of challenges that you can predict a leader will have, we know. How do you help to set a vision? How do you mobilize people? How do you engage partners? How do you prepare for you might not know what the challenge is going to be, but managing change and managing challenges, or in public health, managing crises, is a big part of the job. And then how do you really push an organization to not rest on its laurels and to just continuously improve. I mean, for Jim and I, that we kind of bucketed leadership challenges in some of those ways and tried to break down, what are the what are the values that guide that? What are the what are the behavioral traits? What’s the knowledge? What are the skills and just just the very notion of trying to unpack the term leadership a little bit and figure out what you know, what does that mean, and what, what do you want it to mean, and then having, you know, a program like IRL that lets you experiment with with it, lets you figure out, where do I think I need some more work and to be part of a community that’s interested in the question of leadership, as well as the question of, how do we build better evidence? Because that’s, that’s really how we how we, we learn. I do think, you know, yes, the pedagogy is useful, but the experience of actually trying to apply the principles and the humility to want to want to keep getting better is really important.

Michael Oakes  33:51

You know, when I as we think about the curriculum of IRL, and I think about it in other spaces I work in, one of the interesting things about the leadership literature, if you will. I mean, there’s a gazillion books from the business side about what makes a good leader, military as well, appropriately so. And one of the interesting things that I think is, in general, particularly in the business side, the leadership books tend to find a current, viewed, excellent leader and say, what made him or her great, and it’s sort of backward looking, which is important, give some clues. What’s not clear to me, as we think about building curriculum like an IRL, and I know you think about it in your organization as well, is the other way. Let’s take a person, Jim or Sally or whoever, what training and experiences do we need to offer them to make them a leader if they’re so interested? So that direction, and what’s the evidence for what works and doesn’t work that is really lacking, and it’s a really fascinating observation that I’ve come to in my work here. We don’t really know. And so in some sense, IRL is one big experiment. And I the fellows sometimes joke, are we guinea pigs? And they’re not, but we’re all trying to get better. And so that resonates with you?

Jan Malcolm  35:07

Oh very much. Yep. And I, you know, you’re right. There are a ton of leadership books, many of them good and helpful and good for prompting self reflection. But most of them, it seems like either are very, very focused on personality attributes or specific behavioral techniques, but a little light on what you know? What is the knowledge that’s helpful to have about change processes or community engagement, or how to use yourself or self knowledge you know? And what is the kind of what is the developmental path of how people can not only develop those that that book learning or the basic skills, but as the world becomes more complicated, and as you rise in in leadership, into more and more complex roles, it’s how do you apply those earlier learnings and lessons to a to increasingly complex situations, which is why I think it’s really good for people who are in leadership positions to keep to keep trying to learn. You know, not just assume, well, hey, I’ve been a leader for 20 years, so what’s to learn? I mean, I think there’s always something to learn about what worked and what didn’t.

Michael Oakes  36:22

That humility, I think, is super important. Just never thinking that you’ve got it figured out. Let me ask a question of you that I have asked for myself as I struggle in my own leadership roles, it can be lonely at times, and we have to make some tough decisions. I know you do. How do you make sense of that? How do you go home and rest well on your pillow when you’re making tough decisions? And frankly, sometimes there’s some, there’s some challenging, lonely moments. Yeah, that is what in these books that we’re talking about. It seems that leadership is always so amazing. We get, you know, typically, higher pay, and we’re having these great decisions and impact, and we’re, we’re sharing our vision with the world cool. But then there’s constraints, and there’s pushback, and at least for me, there’s, Am I doing it right? Thoughts on that?

Jan Malcolm  37:11

Oh, right. And, I mean, I do think just give especially we’re talking about Health Policy and Public Health, and the reality of literally unending series of needs and legitimate requests for attention and help and the time and the resources are don’t allow us to do everything that can or should be done, or to try to figure out some logical order in which to tackle things. Does mean setting priorities, and it means managing disappointment and and and helping the folks whose issue is not number one today, not not stop working. Not stop developing, you know, the case and developing the coalition that’s going to help push that issue higher up the radar screen. Because we need to develop the ability to keep refreshing the agenda and reprioritizing rather than being stuck on, you know, only one thing for forever, especially, especially if, as we gather more evidence that the way we’re doing it may not be working, yeah, but that change management process of helping people figure out how to reprioritize and and not discouraging the people whose issue isn’t yet ripe, is a it’s, I didn’t answer your question at all about loneliness, but I do think that’s where community comes in, you know? And And again, what? What I think we’re hearing from the first cohorts of IRL. The magic is in the in the group, and having people that you that you then can call to say whether, in whatever the context is, whatever the issue area, or the type of role you know, finding, finding peers that you can, that you can be candid with and vulnerable with to say, Geez, I’m really struggling with this, or I don’t know what to do, or I’m worried about X, and that is not something I’m going to stay say, standing in front of, you know, a room full of health department people is, I don’t feel like I know, but I need to have somebody that I can say, we all need somebody like that. Yeah, that I’m I feel, I feel unsure, I feel vulnerable about this, and sometimes all you’ll get is support. Like, yeah, I feel that too. And then at least you don’t feel alone right in your journey.

Michael Oakes  39:41

Have there been official mentors, or have you sort of connected with people in more informal ways that have helped you?

Jan Malcolm  39:51

Yeah, well, you know, here, here we go again, with a shout out to Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. But when I, when I was first appointed health commissioner, they had just started a program called the State Health Leadership Initiative, which was specifically aimed at newly appointed state health officers, because what they knew is that it’s a high failure rate job, that the average tenure at that time was less than two years. And that’s a problem for a lot of reasons. It creates lots of instability and turnover in public health agencies. So they were setting out to try to tackle this question about what do you what predicts success for these politically appointed, high visibility jobs, and so I was in the first cohort of that program, and both the learning was superb, and we got access to faculty for this program who’d worked in politics, who’d you know, supported governors, who’d been health commissioners before. So we got to talk to the experts. But it was the group, you know, it was that, you know, that we could just call each other and say, oh boy, this blew up in my face. Or, what did you do about that? So yes, I had some sort. Some access.

Michael Oakes  41:08

Now we know it’s that secret sauce from so many years ago, right?

Jan Malcolm  41:12

I had access, access to expertise, but I also had access to peers.

Michael Oakes  41:17

What is your view on setting up mentoring programs in your organization or elsewhere?

Jan Malcolm  41:23

Yeah, I think it’s really important again. You know, back to the earlier conversation about diversity and inclusion. We have to be really intentional about developing our future leaders and not expecting it to just happen. You know, don’t just absorb it by osmosis, but so we are. We’re trying to develop mentorship and leadership development programs, really, at all levels, both within the health department and across the larger enterprise of state government.

Michael Oakes  41:53

Let’s shift now to, I guess, the last part of our conversation. Let’s talk about the future. Let’s talk about the future of what I’ll call community engaged, action oriented research. From your perspective as a public health leader, what do you see? What’s necessary we’ve talked a lot about. Maybe we can just summarize a few things for the listener.

Jan Malcolm  42:14

Yeah, well, I think we have covered a lot of the key topics. I think you know, really, and I know iRL is working hard to do this really understanding the difference between real community engagement and rhetorical community engagement, because I do believe that there’s a lot of wisdom in communities about what is possible and what’s going to be, what’s going to be effective and what’s not. And I think we waste a lot of time, a lot of resources, misdiagnosing, or, you know, proposing solutions that aren’t community based solutions. So I think that genuine community engagement is huge. And we’ve talked about the challenge of evidence, of, you know, making it rigorous, especially when, when we’re asking, you know, complicated questions. And what you said earlier intrigues me. I think is worth thinking more about. Is like, Maybe we should get better at evaluating smaller pieces along the way, rather than looking for like the massively complex evaluation that can, you know, answer all questions at once, which is, of course, what the political folks wants to tell me the answer, tell me the thing to do…

Michael Oakes  43:29

… and it would be so easy, right? Yeah, you know, if it matters, I talk about this with my students and friends. I talk about it in a baseball metaphor. I think you should, not entirely, but maybe more so focus on hitting some singles instead of trying to swing for the Grand Slam. Grand Slam is necessary. It’s beautiful. People cheer, but you can usually win more games to follow the metaphor with some singles. And obviously that’s one thing we try to do in the IRL program. The amount of resources we can offer our Fellows is not nothing, but it’s not tremendous. And so the scale of their research proposals and projects can’t be huge. And so the hope is that when you’re doing more of those and more of those very well, collectively, sort of the synthesis that you described earlier, can be more useful for decision makers such as yourself. It’s the hope.

Jan Malcolm  44:19

Yep, oh, well, I think we have a moment when people are open to the conversation about different approaches and our the broader we frame the problem, the more important it is to figure out a logical way to start and a logical way to build and to have that be based on, you know, as much evidence as we can gather about what seems to be most useful, or under what set of conditions is one thing useful or another, because it’s, I’m just really, I’m worried that, you know, it’d be easy to squander this opportunity if we, if we can’t get pretty, pretty practical, pretty fast about…

Michael Oakes  44:58

Some of the news media today, all kinds, all corners, talks about evidence, but evidence from a political perspective, evidence from the right or the left, whatever we want to talk about, and therefore invalid overall. And it really depends where you sit politically, to what you care about with respect to research evidence you have thoughts on that going forward. I mean, you’re working with an interesting legislature right now. What is the role of evidence in a divided country?

Jan Malcolm  45:27

Well, you’re right. I mean, not, unfortunately, we, we can. We can create cases. We can find evidence that appears to support whatever point of view we already have. So what do we call it? What do we draw? And I mean, we, I think continuing to search for common values is something, you know, we, we talk about that, but we kind of leapt past that part pretty fast. Yeah, and I think we need to do a lot more of that to try, you know, the whole culture of health idea and is trying to get multiple sectors and multiple points of view to find those points of common values. But then, you know, to build evidence that can be believed by multiple sectors, I think, goes, goes right back – and maybe this is Pollyannaish – but you’d like to think that that if the evidence is is of high quality, and the way it’s done is is rigorous and can’t be just dismissed as, you know, superficial or partisan. You know, I’d like to take the folks at their word, and I do take the people in the Minnesota Senate and the Minnesota House, both of different parties, both saying the same thing about, oh, we have a hard job. We have to prioritize better. We need evidence and and we need to figure out what kind of evidence we’re collectively going to be willing to use.

Michael Oakes  46:48

Yeah, for me, that’s the key element of our program research leadership, where the research is non partisan, the research is as close to the truth as human beings can get to working with, of course, community members who have deep knowledge and respecting them, obviously. But I think the goal, for me, is more evidence that is less questioned from a political perspective. And to me, that’s really the driver of solid research leadership that I think can improve the public’s health and build a culture of health.

Jan Malcolm  47:22

It’s the right quest…

Michael Oakes  47:24

It’s the right quest. With that, Jan Malcolm, let’s end the hour. It’s such a privilege to have you here, such a privilege to know you as a friend and my mentor.

Jan Malcolm  47:33

Thank you, Michael, yeah, this is just a shout out to all all the IRL family, our first cohorts and the cohorts to come. This is, this is special. This is big, big work, and awfully glad you’re where you are doing what you’re doing. Thanks you too. Thank you. Talk soon.

Krystal Lee  47:55

Thanks for joining us for today’s walk down memory lane with Dr Michael Oakes and Jan Malcolm, the original co directors of the IRL program. As always, we want this to be a two way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts with us via our IRL LinkedIn page, and don’t forget to subscribe to Promising Practices for Health Equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, thanks for joining us today, and remember we are all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time…

Storytelling for Health Equity

Season 1, Episode 2 | May 17, 2025

• Hosted by:  Krystal Lee and J. Robin Moon
• Guest: Luis Ortega

Mandy LaBreche  00:04

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You

Krystal Lee  00:23

Hello and welcome to Promising Practices for Health Equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. I’m your host, Krystal Lee, and my co-host today is J. Robin Moon, associate director of research for IRL. Hey Robin! 

In our last episode, we talked about the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program IRL, we talked about how this podcast came about, and our goal of amplifying what we are calling promising practices. Promising practices are activities, procedures or approaches that have shown positive results for us in the context of IRL, and that we think are worth understanding what makes them promising so that you, our listeners, can replicate, adapt, or adopt them in your efforts to achieve health and other kinds of equity. One of these promising practices is storytelling, and today, we are fortunate to have the storytelling guru himself, Luis Ortega as our guest. Luis is a multidisciplinary storyteller, educator, facilitator, Narrative Strategist, and the founder and director at Storytellers for Change. Hi Luis, thanks for joining us.

Luis Ortega  01:50

Hi Krystal. Hi Robin, thank you for inviting me.

J. Robin Moon  01:54

Luis, we’re so happy to have you with us. Before we ask you to tell us about yourself and your work. Briefly, we invite you to engage with us in one of our IRL promising practices, that is, to check in with each other. One of our core beliefs is that nurturing personal relationships is a key to building the kinds of communities that collaborate effectively in work, in the work towards health equity. So at the beginning of most of our meetings at IRL, we do a quick check-in to help us continuously build connections in a personal way, within our team and our beloved community. So here’s our check-in for today, which is something that we’ve done with you. How are you? Physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, also known as “PIES.” It’s a nice acronym, P, I, E, S, I will start. Physically, I am actually in New Mexico this week, driving hours to reach national parks, the land that used to be coexisting with the Native Americans. So I’m a little tired. Physically, intellectually, I am very stimulated, especially with this podcast recording. Emotionally, I’m exhausted with non-stop hammering of all the stuff that’s going on in our country. But spiritually, I am full of hope, and that’s something that I would really like to attribute to our storytelling training and practice that Luis you have helped us with. I’m going to toss it to Krystal.

Krystal Lee  03:36

Thanks, Robin. Physically, I am feeling fine. I’m feeling rested, which is unusual for me, so I’m very grateful for that. Intellectually, I am also feeling stimulated. Part of it is because of my work with IRL. But also, spring is approaching, and I’m planning my garden, yes, planting some things that I’ve never planted before, to include asparagus. I got some asparagus roots yesterday, so I’ve never seen that they look like aliens or like like an octopus or something. So I’m doing my research on how best to promote the growth of the asparagus. Emotionally, I’m a little bit tired. My parents are having some health issues, and, you know, dealing with aging parents can be exhausting, and that’s where I am with that. And spiritually, I just feel calm, which is unusual for me. Usually, I’m an anxious person, but I’ve had to lean into some of the promising practices that I’ve learned in IRL, paying attention to myself, and, you know, taking care of myself, doing some reflection, focusing on the moment instead of trying to fix what’s going to happen tomorrow. So that’s where I stand, and I’m going to toss it to you. Luis,

Luis Ortega  04:47

Thank you, Krystal, and thank you, Robin, for checking in. And I physically feeling strong, but also my body. He is telling me that I should be outside running right now, because usually around this time is when I go for a run. So my body knows. Somatically, it just knows. So after this podcast, I’m gonna go for a run, and I’m looking forward to that. Intellectually as well as emotionally, I am meditating a lot on I just reread a Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, and I’m spending a lot of time just thinking around how change is the great constant, and that proverbial quote from, from, from those books that everything that you touch changes you, and everything that you know it’s in relationship with you is continuously in flow and change. And I’m emotionally embracing that for more than than a few reasons, including that tomorrow is my birthday, so I’m just thinking about change in that particular way, but also just about our greater social, political landscape, and what it means to engage with that. And spiritually, I would say that I feel very rooted, and I’m feeling very connected to my partner, to my family, to my friends, to the work that I do, and that’s a practice that I’ve been cultivating for some time now, and I’m just grateful to be in that space right now. 

J. Robin Moon  06:29

Thank you so much, Luis, and happy birthday, early birthday! Let’s get into it! Okay, I want to tell, I want us to tell the story to our audience, how we met. So we met you. Luis, there are always two sides to the story. We will tell our side first. We met you last year as Krystal and I, as co chairs of the IRL annual leadership meeting in october 2024, and we were in search of a storytelling and narrative change workshop leader, we made storytelling the main theme of the entire meeting, as the path to reimagine our world with health equity, the details of which we’re hoping that you will talk about today, and I’m grateful that you mentioned the Octavia Butler, because I’ve also been reading, we’ve been reading emergent strategies by adrianne marie brown and then Grace Lee Boggs quote that I’m thinking in that book, we need to transform ourselves before we transform our community. So we were looking for an expert who could provide a skills-building workshop that is about storytelling, but as a means, not the end goal, to build our beloved community. It turns out that the task was not very easy, and we spoke to many potential organizations, including the big names that we all know. No names mentioned. But it was just not the right fit. And we were like, what was it they were looking for? We knew one thing that we were we were looking for Marshall Ganz, model of a story of self, story of us, story of now, and really it had to be a tool for community building. So when we finally met with you, we just knew at that point that you were the one. That’s the story that we tell about how we met, and that’s the match made in heaven, as we’d like to think. So tell us about your experience with getting connected with us, with IRL, what resonated with you specifically about the work that we’re trying to do here with IRL?

Luis Ortega  08:31

Yeah, certainly I remember a few items that you just highlighted that immediately align with my ethos and how I think about the role of storytelling, not only in forming and shaping beloved community, but also in the context of healing equity work, and just more broadly speaking, transformation work. I would say that there was also a great deal of alignment when I heard that you were engaging with Dr Shawn Ginwright’s work, particularly his book The Four Pivots. And even before that book, I was already correctly influenced by Dr Ginwright’s work around healing centered engagement, which has played a huge role in helping me to integrate an intentional healing framework within my narrative and storytelling work. I remember us having a lot of conversations to your point, Robin, not only about what it means to engage in storytelling as an outcome, as a product, right, a story that you tell. But the importance of creating a holding space where the process through which we craft the stories is intentional, is relational, is inviting us to see ourselves and each other, the process itself, it’s healing. It’s not just telling stories about health equity, but how do we actually find equitable relationship building. How do we find healing within ourselves and each other as we craft those stories? So that conversation was very energizing for me, because I found a lot of alignment in your language and the scholars and practices that were informing your work, which mirror a lot of some of the fine words that inform my work, and I would say, lastly, just with you and Krystal, as we engage in that initial conversation, for me was also important to see that there was a resonance around not just talking about storytelling as a skill, which certainly it is, you can cultivate storytelling as a skill, but what does it mean for us to engage with storytelling as an embodied practice? In other words, how do we honor each other as storytellers? And that, to me, is essential to the systems transformation work that we need to do. And ultimately, I left that initial call feeling energized and hoping, crossing my fingers, that this would work out for us to partner. And it did, and it’s just been truly beautiful to be with you in this journey since then. 

J. Robin Moon  11:12

Since then, we are so grateful that we found you, we discovered you, and we take all the credit, and I personally have become your disciple, learning and training how to be a collaborative and community-centered storyteller. Tell us, Luis, what connection do you see there is between health equity work, because we’re really talking about health equity in the end now, between health equity work, community-engaged research, and storytelling?

Luis Ortega  11:43

Yeah, certainly. And I’m going to give you a more personal micro answer, and then, I’ll expand, and I’ll talk more from a macro and meta perspective, systematically. I think the first thing that I want to offer is that I fundamentally believe that our well being, as individuals, as a society, as communities, is directly interconnected with the stories that surround us, and by extension, I would say, the stories that live within us. So, to give you a very micro example, I came into this world. I’m from 1987 March, 28 at around 1:30 am and when I came to this world right, almost 38 years ago, I came to this world right in Tenochtitlan, today, known as Mexico City, with a mother who I dearly love and really loves me, with a grandmother and a couple months later, but a year and eight months later, my two younger sisters joined me, and that was my upbringing, right? My mother, my grandmother and my two sisters. Growing up, the stories that I knew were stories that affirmed me. I felt loved, I felt cared for, I felt meaning, I felt connected. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother, drawing and learning how to express myself through, as someone a bit more introverted. I found a great deal of expression through the arts. In my sisters, I found not only a sense of friendship, but also responsibility and wonder. In my mom, I found and to this day, I continued to find tremendous guidance and wisdom and a friend. And as I grew up, I began to encounter other stories.

As I began to reckon with my sexuality as someone that’s queer and bisexual, I began to encounter narratives that told me that I was wrong, that I was wrong to the point where I did not actually come out to my family, to my mom, to my sisters, those same people that made me feel so loved and affirmed I did not come out to them until my mid 20s. I began to encounter narratives about my mestizaje, right, or this idea of being mestizo, the explanation, the story that we give to why is it that I speak the way I speak? Why do I speak Spanish and not Nawat? Why is my skin this particular color, right? Why is my hair texture the way it is? I began to encounter narratives also about how I should relate to others or not, and eventually, when I was 14 years old, and I moved to this country, and I had to deal with other racial narratives. I had to deal with immigrant narratives. I had to navigate, and continue to navigate this political landscape as an undocumented immigrant, I kept encountering stories. Now, why do I start with this? Because for me, there’s a tremendous contrast in the type of stories that I encountered as a child that fundamentally allowed me to hold myself and hold others with a profound sense of love and connection and what feels to me as a persistent and ongoing struggle that I’ve had to navigate as I deal with all these other stories that made me feel extremely disconnected from self and from others, and I think from a systemic perspective, and this is where I began to be informed by the work of Dr Shawn Ginwrightt and others. I begin to analyze and understand how these stories, stories that are fundamentally rooted in a belief system that has created a hierarchy of human value, is a tremendous barrier to any effort to actualize equity and health. And health, it’s just not compatible – an ideology that sustains a belief that there is a hierarchy in human value with the idea of achieving health equity. And therefore the challenge is that if we live in a society where racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, right, where we continue to have tremendous hate directed towards immigrants and refugees, particularly those who are black and brown, particularly directed towards people who are suffering because of displacement.

We have a challenge, and so much of what we have today systematically and structurally built in the US, certainly, although this is the case in many other places across the world, is systems that are driven by these ideologies and that are embedded within the logic of how these systems operate. So they are working exactly how they should be working. And these narratives are fundamentally also connected to what I think MIT scholar, Otto C., Charmer, correctly diagnoses as the most important challenge that we have to tackle in the 21st century. And that is the challenge of disconnection. And from that perspective, I think there are three big narratives that we need to counter and tackle if we are to address issues of health equity. He characterizes them in the following way. He talks about the challenge of ecological separation, social separation, and spiritual separation, or disconnection. The first one is this idea that we as human beings are separate from nature, right? This is the narrative that tells us that we are here to exploit nature and that that’s just the way it is. The second narrative social separation is this idea that there is a ‘we’ and there is a ‘them’, and this is what scholar John A Powell also refers to as the challenge of othering, right with other people. This is returning to this idea of a hierarchy of human value. And last but not least, this idea of spiritual separation is the idea of, how do I separate myself from myself? So those narratives that tell me I’m wrong, I don’t belong in myself. I’m broken, right? So this is where we can talk about these, this crisis in loneliness, right? That oftentimes gets cited now in all kinds of different articles, we can talk about this complete sense of isolation, of suffering, and even diagnosing trauma or sickness through an individual lens, instead of thinking about the collectivist nature and or systemic nature of why are these symptoms emerging? And if we have, I firmly believe this, if we have any hope in addressing any of these isms, any of these issues of separation. I believe that we need narrative and storytelling to counter these narratives. 

And I’ll offer one more item before, before I close this particular reflection. I think countering these narratives is essential, because we do have to name them and understand them and unpack them. And on the other end, we also need to generate new possibilities. And this is where going back to Dr Ginwright’s work, it’s really important his pivot around going from problem loving, right, or just naming problems, unpacking problems. So this is where my background as a researcher, as an educator, is a bias, right? Because I was taught to analyze problems first and foremost. Even in my early training around storytelling, I was taught to always help your audience understand the problem. That’s fantastic. That is a type of storytelling tactic that we need, and it’s also limiting, because we need other paradigms and other forms of engaging with narrative that invite us to also create new ways of being. So this is where I’ll close by just offering. Lee Ann Bells, an educator and scholar from Columbia University who created something called the storytelling project model. And in it, she names four types of narratives that are part of what I refer to as our narrative ecosystem. She calls our attention to the stock narrative, which is the dominant story. I already spent time unpacking that right now, hierarchy of human value. Concealed stories – What are the stories that are concealed by these dominant ideologies, both stories of trauma and neglect and marginalization, but also stories of joy, of resilience, resistance stories, the stories of people, movements, organizations that have always struggled against and pushed back on the dominant ideology, right? And this is where the countering piece comes into play, right, and countering storytelling comes into play. But then there’s this fourth quadrant, and I think this is where we need to be for us to engage in health equity work. Lee Ann Bell refers to these as the emerging or transforming stories’ space, and this is where we need to focus our attention. I believe not to ignore the consultant resistant stories or to counter and name and unpack the stock, but we need to critically  analyze ourselves and our efforts and our work as organizations and practitioners and researchers and ask ourselves, how much time are we actually spending in the paradigm shift in practice of proposing new possibilities and new ways of being? If we are going to achieve health equity, we need emerging and transforming stories that help us visualize, imagine, and believe in the possibility of health equity.

Krystal Lee  21:44

Luis, as always, every time you speak, I try to take copious notes. 

J. Robin Moon  21:51

Yeah, I saw you were doing that, Krystal!

Krystal Lee  21:55

That’s exactly right! So I just want to ask a follow-up question as it relates to some of the things that you have said before. I want to, I really want to highlight this for our listeners, one of the things you talked about is the ideologies that are embedded in the logic of how our systems operate and how the systems are operating as intended, right, based on those ideologies upon which they are built. And you talked about the need to have narratives that counter these ideologies in order to change these systems. And then you also mentioned one of the ways to do that is to name, understand, and unpack these narratives, and then beyond that, to create new paradigms that create new ways of being. So I want to ask you to go a little deeper with us, in around those concepts that you have highlighted, and talk to us about what do you see as the role of storytelling in dismantling the systems that are operating as intended, but to change those to promote and perpetuate health equity instead of what we are seeing right now?

Luis Ortega  23:07

Yeah, certainly. And I can again start with a personal example, and then I can offer some thoughts, insights around how these could manifest at a macro or meta level. I recall a few years ago now, I participated in a storytelling program, and I was passed by one of the lead mentors, facilitator for the session, asked the question, what does it mean to feel whole, to feel well, and to be in a just relationship with yourself and others? That was the entire purpose of this particular program. And mind you, at this point, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on those questions without necessarily phrasing them in that particular way. But what I can tell you is that what emerged for me and what was reaffirmed, because I feel like I had already articulated this, yet I realized in a profoundly, deeply way that I would have to continue to practice this, is that my external systems work requires internal systems work.

In other words, if I’m going to seek to change any of these narratives, right, any of these isms and phobias externally, through my narrative change strategy, through my storytelling, I have to do the work of shifting those narratives internally as well. And I’m not going to get into the nuance right now of thinking through, Is this a chicken or egg situation? Which one goes first? We need to do both things. We need to move in a flow between working externally and internally, and the external world will support our internal work, and most certainly, the internal world will support the external work. The one thing that I will say though, is that too often, what I see organizations and systems do is completely externalize this work. So I would say about 90% of the time, and this is just me on the spot reflecting on this, about 90% of the time when I’m engaging with large systems, that is the ask: help us figure this out externally. They are eager, ready, and willing to tell the story externally, but there are tons of barriers and hesitation to do any of the internal work. And I asked them critically, what happens when the external narrative is in dissonance with internal narrative – misalignment? There’s no wholeness, there’s no wellness, there’s no just relationship. So this is where transactional storytelling happens. This is where the speaker gets a standing ovation, right? And maybe brings in the dollars, right? And the funding also perpetuates harm and also perpetuates inequity and also right, perpetuates these practices that are extremely, extremely harmful to our long-term work of building relationships, building trust, building solidarity, building community.

So there has to be an alignment there that think we continue to struggle with these questions that allow me to, and by the way which I don’t have answers to any of them, I have an ongoing process of me seeking wholeness, of me seeking wellness, of me seeking just relationship with myself. I think we need to think of those questions collectively as well. What does it mean for us to think of ourselves as part of a whole? What does it mean for us to be well, not just individually, but a society? And that’s not how our systems think. That’s not how our healthcare system was designed to work. We are not diagnosing, although I would say there’s definitely research. I don’t want to say that there’s no there’s complete absence of dialogue around this. I’m just my critique is towards how our system, our healthcare system, works, right and by default, many other systems, our education system works. We see individual students. We create individual students. We are not thinking about the quality of a learning community, although too often that is where precisely some of the issues that we need to tackle, access in the collective and we need to think about, what does it mean for us to have justice to ourselves, to each other. Stories that allow us to pursue, not, you know, complete answers. Because I think that I don’t believe in absolute answers. I believe in the process of us seeking what it means to do this all seeking stories that move us in that direction, is the type of narrative work that would allow us to reimagine what these new ways of being right, new structures, new ways of relating to each other, new systems can help us achieve health equity.

J. Robin Moon  28:05

Oh, that’s so great. Thank you. Luis, speaking of tension between inside and outside, when discussing systems change, there’s another kind of tension, the tension between system change versus local change, like a local community change. So in recent years, we have heard about the need for structural change, and in particular, IRL has been pursuing structural racism, dismantling structural racism, and for investing in that, which wasn’t really the case, say, like 20 years ago. So there is progress towards health equity in that sense. But there is this still, this tension, the structural change is hard. It takes a long time while our local communities need help here and now. So it’s like a long-term, short term, like the tension between, in terms of temporality we need “evidence,” “rigorous science,” ROI, or a return on investment”, scalability, etc, to ensure the structure change that we pursue is worth the investment. But then do we really? And that’s an age-old question that social epidemiologists struggle with. So I wanted to ask you, how do we balance these two ends of the spectrum, long-term, system change and short-term and more localized community change, and possibly the role of storytelling? I think you already got into talking about it in terms of outcomes versus the process of this work.

Luis Ortega  29:40

Yeah, certainly. And I think I’ll start by saying that I welcome the tension as long as the tension is guiding us towards healing and solidarity with each other as we navigate the challenges ahead. I think the tension will allow us to be good relatives to each other. I think a lot about the seven generation principle from indigenous teachings that tells us that as we make decisions, we need to be thinking about the impact of our decisions seven generations ahead, and on the other end, I spent a lot of time reflecting on what decisions were made seven generations ago that impact how I’m showing up in the world today. And I think about Mexica and my Nawa ancestors, and what they faced and what they went through  – the process of colonization, through the process of resisting and persisting through that process and how that struggle is still alive today, but also that resilience and that wisdom and those teachings are still there today. And it gives me both a sense of humility and also responsibility to think about the longer arc of just history, and this is where the tension of the change that takes time and the change that’s possible within the now. And again, if we embrace it and it allows us to be in closer relationship with each other and to have greater discernment In how do we take care of each other, our ancestors as well as our future generations? Then, I’m all for struggling with that tension. However, what I do have to name, and I think it’s in the subtext of the question, I think, is that too often, the source of these tensions that your naming, Robin, from my perspective, they are the product of dominant ideology and narrative, like a sense of urgency, scalability, “success,” “best practices” and knowledge. Who holds knowledge? Who holds valid knowledge? How is this probable? What is the return on investment, and who gets to set the terms of that particular agenda, and that tension I’m not here for it. It Is the dissonance that I was naming earlier, right? It does not facilitate trust, it does not facilitate relationships, it does not facilitate healing. It does not facilitate a way for us to cultivate introspection and see ourselves in a way that allows us to engage in the transformation work that is required. So I don’t understand how processes that are inherently inequitable and completely decoupled from the community can in any way lead us to equitable outcomes; it just makes no sense to me. So we need different stories and narratives that reshape that logic for us. And this is not to say that we cannot talk about accountability. Or that we cannot talk about how we engage in research. We absolutely can have those conversations, and even for having a conversation of, how do we redefine what rigorous research is, if and only if, in that process, we’re centering community, wisdom, equity, healing, justice as part of our definition of what it means to be rigorous and who is accountable to that type of rigor. So I think from that perspective, I’ll come back to Dr Shawn Ginwright, honestly, how do we answer that question of, how do we balance this work? Dr Shawn Ginwright oversaw some pretty good ideas, right? Those four pivots going from from lens to mirror, seeing ourselves right, doing the internal work, being relational and not transactional in the work, pivoting from problem to possibility, moving into flow, instead of just the hustle and the grind of just producing and producing and producing work without us actually engaging in the process of flowing through that work. So to me, holding space for those pivots and for us to understand how we move there is how we deal with that tension in a way that allows us to build that solidarity and to facilitate healing.

J. Robin Moon  34:19

Thank you so much. Luis, you could not have said it better, our intention and aspiration for this podcast to be. My spiritual meter gauge went up by four times! I know that we rattled off a lot of great citations and resources from the very beginning for our listeners, we will definitely list those out in our show notes. But for our listeners, for the time being, Luis, who want to learn how to use storytelling as a tool in their health equity work, and who might not have thought about this before to the extent that we might have so far, where do they start? Are there any books, blogs, websites, podcasts, YouTube, videos, something simple, key resources that you might recommend?

Luis Ortega  35:07

Yeah, absolutely. So I would say Storytelling for Social Justice by Lee Ann Bell to just offer a brief framing around that this particular book will introduce you to the concept that we discussed earlier in the podcast about stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, emergent, and transforming stories. It’s a slightly different storytelling book, because I think oftentimes when we think about storytelling, we are wanting to think about characters and the plot of a story, setting and model which are we do need to understand what it means to engage with those different elements of narrative, and I think it’s fundamentally important for us, especially in the context of this podcast right like health equity, for us to understand what is the role of power and what is the role of systems in shaping our experience of story. And I think Lee Ann Bell’s work and this particular tool of thinking of this quadrant right of narratives to analyze our narrative ecosystem is crucial to that work. So I definitely recommend that book is a very short read, heavy on theory, but it also has some very practical elements to it. And I even though it has a focus on education, is very applicable to all kinds of different settings, I think to have more of a focus on personal narrative, collective narrative. You mentioned Marshall Ganz work earlier in the podcast as well. And I certainly think that there’s probably no other framework out there that I can think of that offers a best introduction to what it means to engage with storytelling as a practice of leadership and community organizing than Marshall Ganz’ Public Narrative. There’s way too many resources to name them all, but honestly, any Google search that just puts like Marshall guns public narrative like you’ll find so many YouTube videos of Marshall lecturing on the topic. Like, the same lectures that he delivers at the Kennedy School are available freely on online. He just published a new book. There’s tons of toolkits out there, there’s worksheets. There’s just so many, so much out there that’s accessible for those who just want to read an article and kind of get started to those that want to take a deep dive. Absolutely recommend Marshall Ganz work. And then I think lastly, I’ll go back to just the four pivots. I think even though it’s not a book that teaches you how to tell your story. I do think that Dr Shawn Ginwright, writing engages with story in a really good way. So if you want to see an example of what it means to engage in that introspection, Dr Shawn Ginwright role-models for us through his own reflections, through his own mirror work in the book right of how he’s thinking about these pivots in the context of his own life, and how he’s witnessed these in the lives of others that he’s worked with across his career. So I think that’s another wonderful example as well.

Krystal Lee  38:17

Thank you. Thanks. Luis. What I wanted to do was mention that the things that I have learned about narrative and storytelling and the relationship between narrative and systems, I’ve actually learned from you over the last several months, those of us in IRL have been engaging with you through your work with Storytellers for Change, and I would like for you to share with our listeners a little bit about Storytellers for Change, and you know the resources that are available to them there as well. So whatever you’d like to share about your organization for our listeners.

Luis Ortega  38:49

Thank you, Krystal. So absolutely, I think there’s a couple of resources. We have a toolkit that’s available for free that was part of another collaboration that it’s called Crafting Anti-racist Narratives for Community Development, and it’s a toolkit that guides you through the process of unpacking dominant narratives and then intentionally crafting and envisioning emerging and transforming narratives that advance anti racist and equitable healing center work. It has a focus on community development, but the toolkit itself is pretty accessible to be modified to apply to other fields, and that’s freely accessible online. And then we have a handful of different storytelling courses and resources that focus on everything from developing personal narrative to developing organizational narrative to developing and crafting narrative strategies to engaging with the practice of thinking about, how do we center equity and asset-based practices in our storytelling work? There’s a variety of different lenses. With each one of our courses, but all of them are meant to deepen many of the practices and concepts and apply them into our respective fields and areas of work that we’ve been discussing in this podcast.

Krystal Lee  40:15

Thanks for sharing Luis, and we encourage our listeners to check out Storytellers for Change, at www.storytellersforchange.com Luis, we know that doing this work and working towards equity and against systems of oppression can take its toll. Right? We’ve mentioned Dr Shawn Ginwright many times in this episode and his book Four Pivots, and one of the quotes that speaks to me is it says that changing things that are broken in our society requires individual and collective healing. And I just wonder, like as a final thought, kind of as a check out question, can you share with our listeners? How do you engage in self-care as you continue to engage in this difficult work.

Luis Ortega  41:06

Yeah, certainly there are a few things, but I’ll be brief. I’ll start with rest and sleep. That’s more and more over the years, I’ve shifted my mindset around what it means to prioritize that, and then that’s also just carried into shifting how I start my days. It’s not with my work email. It’s waking up and taking time to stretch and to read and to slow down and to have a steady, calm heart and spirit as I engage with the world. And of course, as you can probably imagine, my capacity to do that shifts depending on what else is happening in my life. However, I think the biggest takeaway for me has been creating a space for me not to feel like a couple of years ago, the time between me waking up and me being in front of my laptop, reading emails and responding to emails and working. I trained myself a long time ago to think that my best writing, my best work, my best output, is in the morning. So I was always thinking, Oh, as soon as I’m awake, I need to go and do this work, because this is when the quality work’s gonna happen. And that was so intrinsically connected to my sense of value and worth and contribution to justice work as well that I did not realize, like what was that was doing to my subconscious also, and to my sense of worth and to what was happening in my life. And now it’s at least two hours, if not more, sometimes between the time I wake up and the time that I actually move into beginning to do what here we would call, quote, unquote work. But also like realizing right that that rest itself, the purpose of that rest is not so that I can be better at work, although I am, I believe better at my work because I give myself space for rest. The purpose of that rest space is rest, and the joy of rest and the joy that I find in reading science fiction or magical realism or novels or writing or poetry, whatever I’m engaging with, although I’ve given up a lot of what I call, like my work reading during that time, and I’ve loved that. So I find that has given me much-needed space. And I’ll close with this, like, a couple of years ago that was catching up with a friend I was talking about, like, how I didn’t have time for reading, for joy, and my friend sort of laughed and said, What do you mean? Like you like you’re reading all the time, and you make time, like time is a construct, right? It’s sort of going back to this idea of these tensions, right, and just realizing how much of my agency I was giving up in even beholding myself to a statement like that. So I’m not going to say that it’s necessarily easy to just suddenly shift your schedule and rethink and imagine what that looks like. I know this can look very differently for any of us.. I just know for me, it’s been progressively over the last few years, shifting how I spend my time so that I can honor this rest that I know I need and holding on to it, because I’ve also learned that is also very easy to give it away, so I’m still very much here and now, how do I practice this in an ongoing basis? And I started by saying in my check-in, that I feel rooted, and I feel like a big reason why is because of this practice.

J. Robin Moon  44:40

Transforming oneself before we transform our community, right? And doing this revolutionary work internally first, that is one of the first things we actually sensed, Krystal and I, the humility and the depth and character building that you took on for yourself, and that in and of itself, just distinguishes yourself from others that we have spoken to. So thank you. We and IRL are so grateful that our paths crossed, and we certainly hope that we continue crossing our paths, and we appreciate your time today that you spent with us to record this podcast. Thank you so much. Luis, 

Luis Ortega  45:23

Thank you, Robin. Thank you, Krystal. 

Krystal Lee  45:25

Thank you, Luis, and thank you so much to our listeners. As always, we want this to be a two-way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you. What promising practices have been impactful in your work to achieve health equity? How do you think storytelling can support or play a part in your health equity work? Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we will also share our show notes and the resources that Luis has highlighted in today’s episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us today, and remember we’re all on this journey together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time. Thank you.

Mandy LaBreche  46:23

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.

Prologue

SEASON 1, EPISODE 1  |  May 5, 2025

Hosted by:  Krystal Lee, J. Robin Moon, Mandy LaBreche, and Cody Cotton

Mandy LaBreche  00:00

This is the Promising Practices for Health Equity podcast brought to you by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Krystal Lee  00:11

Hello and welcome to promising practices for health equity, the podcast created by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, affectionately known as IRL. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience, we explore innovative and actionable strategies to meaningfully advance health equity. I am your host, Krystal Lee, and I have had the pleasure of serving as a Senior Advisor for IRL since 2021. I am a curriculum development specialist and educator who creates transformative, equitable and just learning experiences so that all students can experience the joys and rigors of learning. I am thrilled to be here with my amazing colleagues and Co-hosts, J. Robin Moon, Mandy LaBreche and Cody Cotton. In each episode, one of our co-hosts will join me to talk with our guests about how they approach their health equity work. This podcast is for public health and social sciences researchers, public health practitioners, educators, students and funders. We’re here to share stories, insights and tools to amplify your efforts to create a healthier, more equitable world. First and foremost, let’s get to know our fabulous team. Robin, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to this work.

J. Robin Moon  01:31

Hi, Krystal. Thank you. Hi. I am J. Robin Moon. I am the Associate Director of Research at IRL. I am a transdisciplinary scholar in social epidemiology, a practitioner and entrepreneur for Health Justice and an educator in public health. I joined the IRL in 2020 in the thick of the pandemic, to bring in the expertise of implementing robust scientific research on the ground with real people, letting the rubber meet the road, as we say, bringing together the community leaders and members and academic researchers and creating programming to support these activities. Mandy, I’ll toss it to you. 

Mandy LaBreche  02:12

Thanks Robin. Hi everyone. My name is Mandy LaBreche, and I work as the Associate Director of Operations for the IRL program. I consider myself a day one person, because my first day working for the IRL program was actually the launch day for the inaugural call for applications for Cohort One. All the way back in February 2016 I came into my role as the person in charge of Program Operations, working with a small team, mostly behind the scenes to help make the program come alive. A lot of the early work was focused on recruitment and selection for our annual call for applications. We now have seven cohorts of fellows and teams. Another big part of my role was helping shape the program experience that included things like the curriculum, networking, webinars and in person and virtual and hybrid meetings, I’ve had the enormous privilege of being able to contribute to almost all areas of IRL, and now I’m so excited to be working with Krystal, Robin and Cody on this podcast. Working on IRL has been a really amazing ride for me, both personally and professionally, as a program. We’ve learned so much since day one, and I can’t wait to share about the evolution of the program and how truly inspired we’ve been by the work of IRL fellows and teams. Cody tossing the mic over to you.

Cody Cotton  03:31

Thanks Mandy! Peace, everyone. My name is Cody Cotton, Director of Culture and Human Engagement for the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program. In this role, I focus on fostering an inclusive and collaborative environment that supports our teams of researchers and community partners. By integrating principles of cultural agility and human centered engagement, I aim to enhance our collective efforts towards advancing health equity. Additionally, I serve on IRL Community Action Advisory Board, also known as the CAAB, where I collaborate with fellow members to provide guidance and support to leadership and IRL teams. Our goal is to ensure that research initiatives are deeply rooted in community engagement and effectively address health equity challenges. Krystal, back to you.

Krystal Lee  04:19

Thank you, friends. So the goal of this podcast is to amplify what we are calling promising practices for health equity. Robin, can you help us do some level setting for our listeners? Tell us what is a promising practice and what is health equity.

J. Robin Moon  04:34

Sure! Promising practice means an activity, procedure, approach, policy or technique that has shown positive results in a given local situation. It is to be distinguished from the best practice, as we say all the time, in that it might not have the kind of statistically significant or robust by the number defined by the. academia and research community for different reasons, for internal and external, but that it is worth understanding what makes it promising and worth replicating, adapting or adopting it elsewhere. Health Equity means that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. And note that healthy here means not only an absence of infirmity but thriving to live up to one’s best potential in life. This requires removing structural obstacles to health, such as poverty, discrimination and their consequences, including powerlessness and lack of access to good jobs and their pay, quality, education, housing, safe environments, financial credits, so on, and of course, including healthcare, both of these concepts require individuals being in and with the community, not in their own vacuum, and that is where this podcast comes In.

Krystal Lee  05:59

That’s right. Thanks, Robin. Each episode, we’re going to be talking with members of the IRL community about the strategies that they are using to promote and achieve health equity. Mandy, you’re one of the original members of the leadership team. Tell us a little bit about the IRL program. 

Mandy LaBreche  06:18

Yes, happy to. I always like to describe IRL as a hybrid research and leadership development program that supports teams of researchers and community leaders who are focused on community engaged, action oriented and equity focused Health Research. Each year since 2016 we’ve had an annual call for applications for teams of three people, two researchers and one community partner to apply for the program. Each call for applications has had one to two annual research themes that explore various social determinants of health, and more specifically, I’ll just do a quick power jog through each of our themes. So starting with Cohort One, the themes are early childhood and health and housing community development and health. Our cohort two themes are individual and community resilience and youth development and violence prevention. For both of our themes for cohort three, they are focused on rural America, and they are social and economic determinants to promote health in rural America and solutions for better healthcare delivery in rural America. Our cohort, four themes are clinical practice, social services and health and community development and health. Our cohort five themes are community environment and health and Families and Child Health. And then moving on to our cohort six, themes, the focus was structural racism and community health and well being and structural racism and health care. And last but not least, our cohort seven just has one overall theme, and that is structural racism and health. So during the three-year experience, IRL teams conduct a community engaged research project, and they actively participate in curriculum and networking activities to advance their research leadership. Most of IRL programming is done remotely. We consider ourselves a distance learning program, with the exception of two to three in person meetings per year. The IRL program is a 10-year initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and we are currently in our ninth and final year. To date we have seven cohorts in the program. Each cohort is made up of 12 to 15 three person teams and 36 to 45 individuals that we refer to as fellows. And just a few numbers to share, pretty impressive, if I do say so myself, we have a total of 297 fellows in the program, and 99 teams with research projects in 46 states and Puerto Rico.

Krystal Lee  09:03

Thanks. Mandy, sounds like there’s never a dull moment in the IRL universe, huh? Cody, you are the Director for Culture and Human Engagement. Tell us about where the idea for promising practices came from, and a little about the audience that we have designed this podcast for.

Cody Cotton  09:23

Yes. Thanks, Krystal. Our goal is to build capacity among people who are working towards health equity. I believe that every person has a part to play in this work, but specifically we want to reach people who are looking for innovative approaches and lessons learned from personal experience. This includes researchers, educators, students, community organizations, policy makers and foundations and other funders who are working in the field of public health. I want to note that while we’re talking specifically about the public health space, we also believe that the promising practices that we will highlight throughout this podcast can be applied in any discipline or field. Everyone could take something away from this podcast.

Krystal Lee  10:06

Thanks, Cody, so this will be a time limited podcast series, right? Meaning that it’ll be limited to three seasons. Can you all tell our listeners what they can expect to hear and learn about over the course of each season, Mandy, I’ll go to you first.

Mandy LaBreche  10:25

Over three seasons, members of our IRL community will share their stories, experiences, reflections and lessons learned. Season one examines the development and evolution of the IRL program. In this first season, we’ll hear from our program directors and members of the National Program Center. They’ll share their perspectives and insights from the creation and evolution of the fellowship program, the strategic decisions made along the way, and the value that IRL aimed to bring to the health equity landscape. We’ll then discuss how the promising practices of emergent strategies and restorative justice have contributed to honing our approach to community engaged research.

J. Robin Moon  11:04

In season two, we’ll hear stories, reflections and lessons learned from IRL fellows who, in their own communities and teams, conducted this community engaged, action oriented, equity focused health research and together reimagine new possibilities for true health equity. We will hear about real and honest challenges that they have experienced and had to overcome that are individual, community oriented and structural, and they will share the promising practices that they have created through it all to bring about true, meaningful health equity.

Cody Cotton  11:44

And finally, in season three, we will dream together. We’ll talk about what the future looks like for health equity, looking beyond our current challenges. We’ll dig deep into the promising practices highlighted by our fellows in season two, and the ones we use as a program, such as restorative practices, asset based storytelling, critical self-reflection and many more.

Mandy LaBreche  12:07

By the end of season three, we hope our listeners will feel inspired to use these and other promising practices to connect with each other, engage with their communities and advocate for the systemic changes needed to ensure health equity for all.

Krystal Lee  12:22

Thanks, y’all. For the benefit of our listeners, it’s probably prudent to take some time to talk about some of the terminology that we will use and some of the beliefs and assumptions that we hold terms like community engaged research, interdisciplinarity, beloved community and health equity. Robin, can you tell us about these terms and what they mean within the context of the conversations that we’ll have throughout this podcast?

J. Robin Moon  12:52

Yeah, sure. The IRL program is based on five major beliefs and assumptions. Number one, we believe that change can be accomplished through research, specifically community engaged research, which we define as a research approach, where members of the community actively participate as partners throughout the research process, from the beginning to the end, contributing their insights and perspectives to ensure that the research is relevant and beneficial to their needs, rather than just being studied on by researchers. It emphasizes collaboration and mutual benefit between researchers and community members. Number two, the quality of community engaged research is better when it is led by the community and when it is interdisciplinary, which goes beyond integrating knowledge and perspectives from multiple academic disciplines, by actively involving stakeholders outside academia, like community members or practitioners to Create a shared understanding and solution to a complex issue, often transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. It essentially aims to bridge the gap between academia and real-world applications by including diverse perspectives. Number three, the change we are working and dreaming towards is health equity for all. As mentioned previously, health equity refers to that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. Number four, we also believe that this work is most effective when done in community, and one of the promising practices we have committed to is building a beloved community. A beloved community is a term coined by Josiah Royce, a philosopher and a theologian from the 19th century, but it’s been popularized by Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. The Beloved Community is a concept that has inspired social justice work for decades. Dr King believed that the beloved community would be achieved by replacing racism, bigotry and prejudice with an all-inclusive spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood, and that poverty, hunger, homelessness will be eliminated. It is described as a society that is practical, realistic and achievable. Finally, fifth, we believe that if the promising practices we discuss on this podcast are implemented far and wide, that we can achieve health equity.

Krystal Lee  15:42

Thanks, Robin, and I want to thank you all for your incredible insights and thank you to our listeners for starting this journey with us. In our next episode, we will talk with Luis Ortega of Storytellers for Change, about the use of storytelling as a promising practice for creating a just and equitable world by fostering empathy, harvesting collective wisdom and facilitating healing. 

We want this to be a two-way conversation, so we’d love to hear from you, our listeners, what promising practices have been impactful in your work to achieve health equity, what are some key challenges you’ve had to overcome? Share your thoughts with us via our LinkedIn page, where we will also share our show notes and resources discussed in each episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to promising practices for health equity so you never miss an episode. You can find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, thanks for joining us today, and remember, we’re all on this journey together. We’re all learning together, and every step we take together brings us closer to a healthier, more just world. Until next time, keep innovating, keep collaborating and keep pushing for change.

Mandy LaBreche  16:59

Promising Practices for Health Equity is produced by the Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, a national leadership program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. A special thanks to our guests, our production team at Studio Americana, and to you, our listeners for being a part of this important conversation.