A Community Participatory Approach to Creating Contextually Tailored mHealth Notifications: myBPmyLife Project

Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) are a novel approach to mobile health (mHealth) interventions, sending contextually tailored behavior change notifications to participants when they are more likely to engage, determined by data from wearable devices. We describe a community participatory approach to JITAI notification development for the myBPmyLife Project, a JITAI focused on decreasing sodium consumption and increasing physical activity to reduce blood pressure. Eighty-six participants were interviewed, 50 at a federally qualified health center (FQHC) and 36 at a university clinic. Participants were asked to provide encouraging physical activity and low-sodium diet notifications and provided feedback on researcher-generated notifications to inform revisions. Participant notifications were thematically analyzed using an inductive approach. Participants noted challenging vocabulary, phrasing, and culturally incongruent suggestions in some of the researcher-generated notifications. Community-generated notifications were more direct, used colloquial language, and contained themes of grace. The FQHC participants' notifications expressed more compassion, religiosity, and addressed health-related social needs. University clinic participants' notifications frequently focused on office environments. In summary, our participatory approach to notification development embedded a distinctive community voice within our notifications. Our approach may be generalizable to other communities and serve as a model to create tailored mHealth notifications to their focus population.

The Moby Bookmobile: Providing Health Education Materials in Wyoming Indian Country

The COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for Native American populations to access health information. Through funding from the Network of The National Library of Medicine Region 4, a community library was able to enhance their native and nonnative health collections for distribution on the Wind River Reservation in Central Wyoming. The book mobile was originally funded by the Wyoming State Library through American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 funding to increase literacy efforts during the pandemic. Materials were distributed at multiple locations throughout the reservation and individuals indicated they appreciated the materials being provided. This program was successful in distributing health information to an underserved priority population within the United States. Hopefully, similar programs would be successful in enhancing health education programs with other priority populations in both the United States and the world.

Mural Painting to Collect Sensitizing Data and Encourage Research Participation Among U.S. Latinos

PURPOSE

To describe a mural-based intervention that can be implemented in partnership with community members in Latino neighborhoods in order to improve awareness of barriers to recruitment/retention of U.S. Latinos in clinical research, while augmenting researchers' access to sensitizing concepts critical for rigorous study design.

BACKGROUND

Latinos in the United States suffer disproportionately from several chronic illnesses but are underrepresented as researchers and participants in National Institutes of Health-funded research. This lack of representation inhibits a nuanced awareness of the health needs of U.S. Latinos and hampers efforts to address a persistent lack of health equity among U.S. Latinos and other communities of color. Art-based interventions implemented in Latino communities are increasingly being recognized for their ability to bridge this gap and positively affect the quality and quantity of research partnerships between clinical researchers and U.S. Latinos.

METHOD

This article describes a mural-based intervention piloted in two predominantly Latino neighborhoods between 2016 and 2020. The design of this method was guided by community partnered participatory research practices and involved an Assessment-Diagnosis-Planning-Implementation-Evaluation approach.

RESULTS

Mural painting addressed many of the participation challenges often associated with underrepresentation of Latinos in academic research and allowed for sensitizing interviews with key community members surrounding topics of interest to the research team.

CONCLUSION

Research methods that acknowledge traditional art forms, such as mural painting, create a space for building trust and spark interest in future research participation, while augmenting researchers' access to sensitizing concepts that may improve the cultural competence of future studies, projects, and interventions.

Developing Community-Based Mentorship: Supporting Health Science Training in Historically Marginalized Communities

Community mentors can play a unique and critical role in developing and supporting graduate and health professional student learning in underresourced community-based settings. These mentors can benefit from extra preparation for a potentially unfamiliar role as teachers about complex social and structural challenges faced by the populations with which they work. Encouraging mentors to recognize and share their valuable expertise while developing their teaching skills can (1) improve mentors' abilities to work effectively with graduate-level and health science students from multiple disciplines, (2) bolster student learning about important historical social and structural determinants of participants' health, and (3) help students understand the broader context within which organizations serving vulnerable populations operate. As such, in one full-time, community-engaged, interdisciplinary practicum program, Bridging the Gaps-Pittsburgh, part of the multiinstitutional Bridging the Gaps Network, a half-day mentor workshop has been required for two decades for new community mentors to develop their capacity to be community-based teachers of largely graduate-level health science students. Additionally, program staff aim to support mentors and connect them to faculty and community resources in a variety of ways. Our model supports the argument that applied learning by health professional students in community settings can be significantly enhanced through building and supporting the capacity of community mentors to act as recognized teachers in areas of community expertise.

Changing the Game: College Dance Training for Well-Being and Resilience Amidst the COVID-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted all aspects of life, from health to financial to social. College students in particular have faced difficulties adjusting to an entirely virtual atmosphere, compounding the normal stressors that come with full class loads and transitioning into more independent adult lives. In response to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, a faculty member at the University of South Florida's College of Public Health designed impromptu, free dance lessons offered through a virtual video platform to the college and broader community. The lessons were offered with the intent of providing a healthy and engaging environment to help students and others in the community cope with lockdown stress, depression, and anxiety throughout spring and summer 2020. This article summarizes the structure of the intervention, lessons learned throughout implementation, and the broader practice potential during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

The Activist Lab and the MOULA Program

The Activist Lab at the University of South Florida College of Public Health is an exciting initiative that serves to build interdisciplinary advocacy and leadership skills for public health students and the community. The Lab is led by a very active student advisory group that with the Director develops the advocacy strategies and focus areas for change. The Activist Lab's More Opportunities to Use Learned Advocacy, or MOULA program, allows students to work side by side with local agencies to support their advocacy efforts. A recent student works with the local Guardian ad Litem program to determine needs and services for children in the foster care system who have also been trafficked. The student is working with attorneys, social workers, families, advocates, and others so that the best needs of the children are met. Students must apply and be selected for the MOULA program based on their responses as to how they could meet the agency's needs. The best responses and matches with the agencies are then determined. Students who participate in MOULA do midyear and final-year reports, evaluate their experiences, are evaluated by the agency mentor, develop a presentation on their experiences, and are interviewed on one of the Activist Lab podcast episodes. The Activist Lab and initiatives such as MOULA provide an opportunity for students to learn and advance critical public health advocacy skills and will help strengthen these skills for future success.

Developing a Community-Based Research Project Proposal to Build Public Health Educator Capacity: A Graduate Student Perspective

This article is the author's first-person perspective of completing an Applied Practice Experience (APE) at an accredited public health program. Graduate-level public health students in the United States are mandated by the Council on Education for Public Health to complete this supervised field experience to apply knowledge and concepts to real-world public health practice. For his APE, the author worked with a faculty advisor and two community groups to facilitate and submit a community-based participatory research grant proposal. This article discusses the author's experiences before, during, and after the APE. The author outlines challenges and success of working on this applied project. The article concludes with implications for public health education specialists regarding experiential learning and applied practice experiences for graduate students.

Enhancing Periconceptional Health by Targeting Postpartum Mothers at Rural WIC Clinics

The overall goal of this pilot quality improvement (QI) intervention was to (1) assess the feasibility of making a WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) systems-level change that added measurement of maternal weight and discussion of maternal health habits into each postpartum maternal and offspring visit in rural clinics in Colorado and (2) assess the impacts of the intervention on maternal diet, physical activity, and weight status. A mixed-method evaluation approach was used involving the collection of quantitative data (HeartSmartMoms usage reports, manual WIC chart reviews [to calculate screening rates], pre-/postsurveys, and weight status [body mass index]) and qualitative data (focus groups and project team meeting minutes). It was determined it is feasible to make a short-term systems-level change; however, many barriers were encountered in doing so, and the results were not sustained. The QI intervention did decrease participants' daily consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and maternal weight status (controlling for maternal age and language), but did not improve any other eating/physical activity behaviors. Lessons learned and recommendations to improve the implementation of health promotion interventions aimed at improving postpartum maternal health, which can increase health during the periconceptional phase, and in turn, improve the health outcomes for a child, are discussed.

Case study in designing a research fundamentals curriculum for community health workers: a university-community clinic collaboration

Community health workers (CHWs) are increasingly incorporated into research teams. Training them in research methodology and ethics, while relating these themes to a community's characteristics, may help to better integrate these health promotion personnel into research teams. An interactive training course on research fundamentals for CHWs was designed and implemented jointly by a community agency serving a primarily Latino, rural population and an academic health center. A focus group of community members and input from community leaders comprised a community-based participatory research model to create three 3-hour interactive training sessions. The resulting curriculum was interactive and successfully stimulated dialogue between trainees and academic researchers. By choosing course activities that elicited community-specific responses into each session's discussion, researchers learned about the community as much as the training course educated CHWs about research. The approach is readily adaptable, making it useful to other communities where CHWs are part of the health system.

Training partnership dyads for community-based participatory research: strategies and lessons learned from the Community Engaged Scholars Program

This article describes the development, implementation, evaluation framework, and initial outcomes of a unique campus-community training initiative for community-based participatory research (CBPR). The South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research Center for Community Health Partnerships, which functions as the institution's Clinical Translational and Science Award Community Engagement Program, leads the training initiative known as the Community Engaged Scholars Program (CES-P). The CES-P provides simultaneous training to CBPR teams, with each team consisting of at least one community partner and one academic partner. Program elements include 12 months of monthly interactive group sessions, mentorship with apprenticeship opportunities, and funding for a CBPR pilot project. A modified RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance) framework guides the process, impact, and outcome evaluation plan. Lessons learned include challenges of group instruction with varying levels of readiness among the CBPR partners, navigating the institutional review board process with community co-investigators, and finding appropriate academic investigators to match community research interests. Future directions are recommended for this promising and unique dyadic training of academic and community partners.