Wow, how time flies! It is so hard to believe that a month has already passed since I started interning with Community-Campus Partnerships for Health (CCPH), specifically with the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics-Underserved Populations (RADx-UP) Program. This program has covered quite a bit of ground in the first four weeks of my internship.
I hit the ground running and have enjoyed supporting the team in various ways, from meetings to training development and facilitation.
Opportunities to Collaborate with the RADx-UP Team
Let’s start with Office Hour consultations. These consultations are collaborations between CCPH consultants, Engagement Impact Teams (EITs), and project partners, which help partners identify effective and valuable strategies to advance their community engagement efforts. Project partners can discuss successes and challenges they’ve encountered while working with their communities. I’ve not only gotten an opportunity to observe but also to contribute my insights and ideas on how project partners can reach their goals in a timely manner. The most significant part of this experience was to see project partners respond with such appreciation for the time we shared, which was invaluable.
In addition to supporting the team on in-house matters, I recently collaborated with CCPH Program Coordinators Emily Finley and Fatima Guerrab and Evaluation Specialist Alan Wells on a training presentation. This presentation focused on the role of community health workers in ethical research and health equity initiatives. I got to present the role and importance of community health workers before transitioning into questions and closing with an engagement activity. I developed a “Kahoot!” to review essential information and evaluate participants’ retention of the information.
Small but Mighty
As I continue to support the team, I look forward to developing a unique initiative to address an urgent need that many project partners have shared. With the rapid growth of the RADx-UP program, the small but mighty CCPH team oversees more than 120 projects! The desire to continuously enhance the capacity of RADx-UP research and community partners is a top priority for the CCPH RADx-UP Team. As such, I plan to develop two abbreviated online training modules for projects to reference anytime and anywhere. The training would consist of shortened modules of Authentic Partnerships and Fundamentals of Community Engagement that will give partners, researchers, and community members the training essentials within a self-paced environment that is available to them beyond office hours. The shortened trainings would use content from the existing presentations and serve as a brief yet thorough introduction to these concepts. My hope for this project is to provide an intentional solution that adds to the many resources available within CCPH!
I am immensely grateful to serve alongside such an incredible team and have learned so much from my colleagues! I could not have asked for a better environment to begin an impactful career in public health, health equity, and social justice. Stay tuned for my blog next month to see how our projects are going and learn about new projects in the works!