Immigrant Health and Youth submitted to the National Institute of Mental Health
In fall 2007, TCRC awarded seed funding to Jayanthi Mistry and a coalition of community partners to develop a proposal around education and mental health in Somerville youth. The team submitted their proposal to the National Institute of Mental Health at NIH in June 2008 under the title, Immigrant Youth: Health and Resilience. The community partners are The Welcome Project (Warren Goldstein-Gelb from the steering committee), Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center (Carol Wan from the steering committee), Immigrant Service Providers Group/Health (Alex Pirie from the steering committee), and the Somerville Public Schools. Tufts professors Jean Wu and Susan Ostrander (both from the steering committee) are also co-investigators. The proposal is for a 2-year developmental grant.
NIH to fund Assessing and Prevention of Obesity among New Immigrants
The National Institute of Child Health and Development (at NIH) is in the process of funding the Assessing and Prevention Obesity among New Immigrants proposal to which TCRC provided seed funding in 2006. This is also a community-based participatory research study that is a collaboration of Tufts (Chris Economos of the steering committee) and the Brazilian Woman’s Group, Community Action Agency of Somerville (Alex Pirie of the steering committee), Haitian Coalition, and the Welcome Project (Warren Goldstein-Gelb of the steering committee). This five year $2.5 million study immigrants and obesity in Somerville.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (at NIH) has funded the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) proposal for which TCRC provided seed funding in 2005. This community-based participatory research study is a collaboration of Tufts (TCRC steering committee members Doug Brugge and John Durant) and five community organizations: Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership (Ellin Reisner from the steering committee); Chinese Progressive Association (Lydia Lowe from the steering committee); Latin American Health Institute (Bart Laws from the steering committee); Chinatown Resident Association and Committee for Boston Public Housing. The five year, $2.5 million project will study near highway pollution and its health effects in Somerville, Chinatown and possibly South Boston.The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (at NIH) has funded the Community Assessment of Freeway Exposure and Health (CAFEH) proposal for which TCRC provided seed funding in 2005.This community-based participatory research study is a collaboration of Tufts (TCRC steering committee members Doug Brugge and John Durant) and five community organizations: Somerville Transportation Equity Partnership (Ellin Reisner from the steering committee); Chinese Progressive Association (Lydia Lowe from the steering committee); Latin American Health Institute (Bart Laws from the steering committee); Chinatown Resident Association and Committee for Boston Public Housing.The five year, $2.5 million project will study near highway pollution and its health effects in Somerville, Chinatown and possibly South Boston.
Tufts/T-NEMC CTSA Proposal
TCRC steering committee members Laurel Leslie, Elmer Freeman and Doug Brugge helped develop and will be part of the leadership core for the community engagement aspect of the new Clinical and Translational Science Initiative grant to Tufts from NIH. This $25 million, five year award will, among other things, provide important opportunities for community involvement in clinical research at Tufts and Tufts Medical Center.
Speed Dating
We hosted the first ever “speed dating” event at Tufts. The half day program was designed to introduce Tufts researchers and local community members to each other. The event was attended by about 2 dozen community representatives and a similar number of Tufts faculty, students and administrators. There was positive to enthusiastic feedback on the event, although if one problem was evident it might have been that finding the perfect collaboration in one morning was a bit optimistic.
TCRC at the tenth annual conference of CCPH, 2007
A notable recent public presentation was the session that Lydia Lowe of the Chinese Progressive Association, our graduate assistant Bindu Panikkar, and our director, Doug Brugge conducted at the tenth annual conference of the Community Campus Partnerships for Health in Toronto in April, 2007. Our session was on “community research and community organizing” and was attended by about 60 actively engaged conference goers. The conference was a substantial success with 650 attendees, mostly from the US and Canada, but also from many other countries.
Symposium 2006
Our community research symposium in spring 2006 was widely judged a success. However, based on discussion with our advisory board we decided not to try to simply replicate the program again in 2007 and instead we are planning on holding a working session in the fall of 2007 that will be designed to help initiate new collaborations between faculty and community partners.
