Innovative programs elevate local communities in public health work

Three programs out of the UIC School of Public Health (SPH)–the Life Scholars Fellowship, the Citizen Scientists Program and the Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning initiatives (CEnTL)–are working to tackle inclusive pathways to public health for the city of Chicago post pandemic, specifically through supporting and training community health workers. These programs emerged organically out of SPH’s participation with Chicago’s citywide, hyper-local COVID-19 response which centered the expertise of community members and trusted community-based organization in providing outreach and engagement to their communities.

This work is guided by a set of inclusive, transformative values and principles focused on anti-racist community engagement, justice and equity. These principles include centering people with lived and living experience resisting systems of oppression, building community and academic capacity for collaboration and shifting power to community, co-learning in an accommodating environment that normalizes healing, love and belonging, acknowledging historical harm and investing in transformation not transaction.

“We seek inclusive processes that center community expertise in our classrooms, research and in our institutional change initiatives. In doing so, we challenge the notion that certain forms of knowledge are more valid or credible than others, and that centering voices and experiences that have been marginalized from mainstream systems will help us create more inclusive, generative systems,” stated Jeni Hebert-Beirne, PhD, professor of community health sciences in SPH and Emily Etzkorn, MPH, project coordinator in SPH.

The Life Scholars Fellowship was created to support community health workers in returning to UIC to seek degrees to advance their public health work, centering their lived/living experience in campus-wide events, initiatives and activities–particularly those aimed at systems change.

The Citizen Scientists Program was developed to train community health workers in research skills and concepts in order to build SPH’s capacity to do community-based participatory research to advance the city’s health equity goals post pandemic. The program is currently being institutionalized within the UIC Center for Clinical and Translational Science in partnership with OCEAN-HP while building a companion youth program in collaboration with the Chicago Department of Public Health and the Healthy Chicago Equity Zones (HCEZs).

The Community-Engaged Teaching and Learning initiatives (CEnTL) emerged as SPH was on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response. Funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, CEnTL seeks to create an infrastructure that deepens the ability of educators to prepare students for the future, uncertain, public health workforce. By centering the expertise of community partners and members in the learning process, CEnTL hopes to instigate institutional transformation to dismantle the ways in which academia can be complicit with structural violence by not using teaching practices that uplift community expertise and address community priorities.

CEnTL is comprised of three major initiatives: Community Course Alignment (CCA), Health Justice Speakers Bureau (HJSB) and Liberatory Educators Aspiring and Practicing in Principled Struggle (LEAPPS).

In Community Course Alignment (CCA), students apply course material through semester-long class projects that are designed to meet the needs of collaborating community-based organizations, such as mutual aid organizations and grassroots community groups. One example of CCA work is the program design, implementation and evaluation plan developed by a small group of Master of Public Health (MHP) students who helped a community-based organization to create a Community Cares Closet. This closet now serves 40+ families a month in Uptown through culturally humble hygiene, household, women’s and other products.

Health Justice Speakers Bureau (HJSB) is a cohort of community of practice (CoP) leaders who share their expertise in SPH courses with a grounding in public health, community expertise and lived/living experience with resisting systems of injustice. LEAPPS is a community of practice of faculty, staff, students and community partners who are committed to social justice and bringing liberatory approaches to learning spaces, broadly defined.

CEnTL has earned national and local recognition, including the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health (ASPPH) 2022 Practice Award, the 2023 Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health Innovative Curriculum Award and the 2023 UIC Community Engagement Award. Additionally, CEnTL received an award for presenting their findings at the 2024 National Collaborative for Education to Address the Social Determinants of Health (NCEAS) annual conference hosted by Northwestern University.

In looking to the future, Hebert-Beirne and Etzkorn hope that community-engaged practices will be normalized on campus and citizen scientists will be standardly included in research settings, with fair and equitable compensation and expertise that is valued and respected.

“We want more thought partners and collaborators across the campus,” they shared. “We would like to learn from and more strategically align with similar efforts to be able to elevate the impact of our work.”