“What I love about this is there’s a power to impact vector system. If you don’t share power, you’re not going to have impact, right?” said Dr. Nancy Chin, pointing to a figure published by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about meaningful community engagement. The degree to which power is shared with the community (whether they’re informed, involved, or driving the project) determines the impact of the project. This figure was part of a presentation she recently led with Dr. Ann Marie White at the Association for Prevention, Teaching and logo (APTR) conference about their course, Internships in Community Engagement, which they have been teaching through the Public Health program at the University of Rochester since 2013.
“As Dr. Chin nears her retirement, we really wanted to use this as almost our capstone for teaching this course and say, what have we learned? We’ve had 24 cohorts of students in 12 years, so we’ve gone through a lot of iterations. We wanted to extract those principles around how we have seen the course support student success in learning how to be community engaged, and invite other academics, other program leaders, and other members of the community to think about how they can create these opportunities in their programs,” said Dr. White.
A frequent theme that has come up in student reflections, Dr. White said, is the “campus bubble.” “The themes that come up are, ‘I’ve been in a bubble on the campus for so many years and this [course] has given me that opportunity to be part of the wider community, which is something that I’ve missed.’ ” For some students, these internships inform their decision to stay and work in Rochester; inspire them to pursue a Masters in Public Health; and lead to continued volunteering, or even employment with their placement site.
Currently, there are 11 placement sites for students. These sites span the spectrum of public health, including recovery services, the housing crisis, youth development, and cultural programming.
“Everything is public health. Housing is public health. Food is public health. Recovery services is public health. That’s not my line. Sandro Galea, the [former] Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health pointed that out, as did Sir Michael Marmot, whose work established social factors as the biggest determinants of health,” said Dr. Chin. “How would you answer that?” she asked Dr. White, modeling the sharing of power and co-creation of knowledge that they teach their students.
Dr. White continued, “As we think about the research of Sir Michael Marmot, what that’s evolved into now is our understanding that health happens where you live. It’s all of the conditions of where you live. Our students are very aware now of, for instance, the effects of red lining, and how that history influences what’s happening with children’s health in schools today. They can see that narrative. Then they look to see, how do we engage the community around changing those factors? Because public health ultimately is about change.”
At the agency level, Dr. Chin and Dr. White have seen the impact that their students have had.
“When you’re a nonprofit, what you produce is a mission. So you’re always looking for, ‘Where can I get resources and capacity to produce a mission?’ Our students become a resource that helps them build capacity and create new opportunities and support the growth of these agencies when they do see that there’s something more that they want done and they need some extra help,” Dr. White explained.
For example, the Father Tracy Advocacy Center started out with a director and a volunteer, mostly serving coffee and sandwiches. Through grant writing and eventually supporting outreach activities, student interns helped them expand their agency to the point where they now occupy an entire building, offer expanded services, have a larger staff, and are part of an ambassador’s program in Rochester helping to employ unhoused people.
“We focus on helping the students think through sustainability of what it is that they’re doing. They’re there for a short amount of time. So that’s part of our mentoring and support and their work as interns: how can I make what I’ve done have a ripple effect? They work with their site preceptors at the community agency to ensure that ripple effect carries, even when they’re not there any longer,” Dr. White explained.
Where a student’s engagement falls on the axis of power and impact often depends on the depth of the relationship and time with a community partner. Students in the Internships in Community Engagement course have the advantage of building upon the strong foundation that Dr. Chin and Dr. White have built with these partners.
“When Ann Marie and I got this course up and running in 2013, right away we could have it be community-driven because we were engaging with long-term partners,” said Dr. Chin.
Dr. White elaborated. “Although they [students] have a short amount of time to come in, they’re coming into a longer narrative. And so our relationship with our community partners can help fill in the broader context for them and help them make sense of which part of the story they’re engaging in at the moment along the transformation.”
Transformation, the point at which change occurs, is the gold star for community engagement. In the context of public health, Dr. Chin explained, “We know from the history of public health of researchers parachuting in, doing their project, leaving with the data, and nothing changes. It’s not transformational. Everything should be community engaged is my bias because it ensures the sustainability of programs, it ensures successful outcomes of programs, and it ensures that when the conditions change, so do the programs, so do the organizations, and that we’re not pushing programs into the community that are no longer viable in a community.” To reference the power impact vector system, it requires letting the community drive the project.
There are sometimes limitations to how much power can be shared with a community. Dr. Chin says that the meaningful community engagement figure is not meant to diminish the work of people who may be doing work that is more community-informed rather than driven. Rather, she sees it as a useful tool for gauging where you are and where you want to be, especially for faculty who are seeking to incorporate community engagement into their courses.
In addition to using the community engagement figure, Dr. Chin recommends looking at local data sources to identify community needs and connecting with people at your own institution to see who else is doing this work. “It avoids needless redundancy and it actually promotes an integrated approach to working with community agencies,” she said. Some offices, like the Center for Community Engagement, have a database of community partners who have a history of partnering with University staff and faculty.
Dr. White highlighted another resource offered by the Center for Community Engagement, including grants to support the development and operations of community-engaged courses, which addresses barriers to community-engaged learning including transportation costs for students. “With that extra institutional resource, we can enable active learning beyond our walls,” she said. “[Through] our partnership then with the students, they can help expand and support the leading edge of where our partners are engaging with new policies, [pursue] new funding opportunities and help move the needle on how things are getting done that are transformational.”
