The MALAMA Aquaponics Project actually started back in 2009. One of our team members, Auntie Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, is a community leader in Waimānalo and has been doing community aquaponics education for over 10 years now. She saw the need and the interest for the community to grow their own food. Colonization impacted Native rights that people have lost in Hawaii, which fragmented and disconnected Native Hawaiians from their own traditional food systems, and being able to grow their own food and having access to land. She saw this disconnect and how it contributed to high rates of obesity and cardiovascular diseases among Native Hawaiians. I got connected with Auntie Ilima through my graduate research assistantship. I just kind of followed her around, and I was one of her fans.
culture of health
Meet the Research Leaders: Carlton Turner
I am the community partner in a project focusing on reimagining, both the health infrastructure and food infrastructure, in our small community of Utica, Mississippi. So far it has looked like the community building skills in collecting data in the form of story, learning how to do oral histories, learning how to do interviews, and really understanding how those pieces can aid us in reconstructing a rural community that basically has been decimated by disinvestment and deterioration over the last three decades.
We cannot build a culture of health without first building a culture of empathy
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has become synonymous with the phrase “building a culture of health”. Many of us working in public health are diligently pursuing the promises embedded within this phrase, such as equity, justice and well-being for all people. And yet, we cannot build a culture of health unless we first have a culture of empathy.
Research Leadership in Action: A Life Story and Lessons Learned by Dr. Veronica Womack
While growing up in rural Alabama, I had the great fortune of encountering life experiences that made me intellectually curious about the life circumstances and relationships that I observed. During this time, fundamental questions about rural people and places were formed and I have spent both my personal and professional life trying to answer them. My early career was focused on documenting and highlighting the lives of rural people, particularly those in the Black Belt region of the South. Not only was this region’s culture my own cultural heritage, it was also critical in the development of our country’s socioeconomic and political systems. So, while often overlooked, what happens in the Black Belt region matters, historically and today.
Our Statement of Solidarity
At Interdisciplinary Research Leaders, we stand in solidarity with the family of George Floyd and other families who have lost their loved ones to police brutality, with the protestors locally and around the world, and with all who are demanding justice and action to dismantle the systems of racial oppression that Black people face daily.
Charting Our Own Data-Driven Path
If you’ve never started your own nonprofit, it’s a lot like everything else. The parts I thought would be hard were easy, and the parts I thought would be easy were hard.
But in the end, it’s about the kids and my state. Right now, we’re in uncharted territory, and no one seems to know how to chart a path out. For me, the answer is data. Data charts the path out. That’s where we’ll begin.
