On the anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown, President Biden in his speech noted COVID-19 has had a significant impact on everyone’s lives and that “while it was different for everyone, we all lost something.” We must acknowledge that Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) have larger losses, in comparison to Whites. The losses that BIPOC, and especially Latinos, have experienced during COVID-19 have important implications for stress, and consequently mental health outcomes. We must recognize the major stressors Latino families are facing under COVID-19 so that we can address the health needs of this group as we move forward.
IRL fellows
Building a Trusting Foundation during the Pandemic Goes a Long Way Towards Community-Engaged Research
Why we organized this special session. Regardless of where teams are on their three-year IRL journey, fellows have been sharing how their communities are responding to the norm-altering disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, structural racism, murders of our Black community members, and political turmoil surrounding the presidential election. Fellows have also been sharing the challenge of continuing their research and community engagement activities in a way that centers community voice during this unprecedented time. The January 2021 cross-cohort virtual forum was designed to share IRL teams’ common ground and leverage their experiences tackling community engagement and research challenges.
Cross-Cohort Forum: Community Engagement
Since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in the early spring of 2020, IRL leadership has adapted to accommodate and support its fellows. Our fellows have had to quickly figure out how to make dramatic changes to their research and community engagement plans. Fellows across cohorts expressed their interest and need to learn from and share with one another successful and sustainable practices in connecting with and engaging their communities while carrying out their IRL projects.
Meet the Research Leaders: Nick Zaller, PhD
As a team, we’re all involved in work with criminal justice populations. We’ve been particularly interested in how we can provide better access to substance use and mental health treatment among folks who are under community supervision, so people who are on probation or parole.
We proposed to do a pilot study integrating telehealth counseling into a probation parole office setting. We have a lot of folks in Arkansas who live in very rural communities. They have poor access to behavioral health treatment, yet they’re under community supervision. They’re mandated to come in and interact with their probation parole officer. Plus, if they’re required to attend treatment, they’ll have to find a way to actually show up. We figured if we integrate all this, folks could go to their probation office and get more services so they wouldn’t have to show up a bunch of different times. We designed a telehealth intervention, six counseling sessions.
We started enrolling people in that, and then COVID hit. Our probation parole offices had to shut down. We were focusing on one area, one office, and now we’re taking a step back and saying, “Ok. Let’s talk to other area offices that serve rural areas.”
Meet the Research Leaders: Kathleen Wolf, PhD
My team members are Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and Cary Simmons, a landscape architect. Our project is about schoolyard conversions – to explore how green schoolyards can become community parks – and we’re working in the city of Tacoma, Washington. Cary and the Trust for Public Land (TPL), our community partner, has analyzed communities all around the Puget Sound area. They’ve found that underserved neighborhoods often have a dearth of parks, and that’s the situation in our study location.
Meet the Research Leaders: Whitney Garney, PhD, MPH
We are working in Hearne, a small, rural community in east central Texas. We originally planned to address substance use health disparities. Through our first year of research we learned from the community that was a symptom, but one of the underlying reasons was lack of opportunities for youth. We reprogrammed our project to look at increasing opportunities. We’re using a process called “human-centered design” or “design thinking” to engage youth to develop their own program, set of products, or whatever the result is. We don’t have the answer at the beginning of the process. We’ll work with youth over the next year and a half to develop their program and then pilot test it.
