CSD's Summer with New York Presbyterian's Uptown Hub Learn-Try-Apply

Editor's note:

Uptown Hub is housed within New York-Presbyterian and Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and is a part of Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Criminal Justice Investment Initiative(“CJII”) to establish a Youth Opportunity Hub in Upper Manhattan. Along with community collaborators, the initiative serves over 250 youths aged 14 to 24 years each year who have been or are at risk for involvement with the juvenile or adult judicial systems. Uptown Hub’s mission is to act, create, and inspire growth within youth and their communities. By promoting positive and healthy futures, the Uptown Hub empowers members to develop self-advocacy and pursue their dreams by connecting with holistic and culturally-affirming services and resources.)

By
Haein Shin
September 04, 2020

For the past 8 weeks, CSD's education team partnered with New York Presbyterian Hospital's Uptown Hub Learn-Try-Apply (L-T-A) summer 2020 program to create a Public Health & Community Education "track" to increase awareness and ideate solutions for community-based education strategies to address community needs based on students' public health concern and topics of choice.

Student project summary

CSD team’s previous Community Health Workers program led by Dr.Sonia Sachs and Community Education Workers program led by Dr. Radhika Iyengar, gave the education team an approach to take the program as a lens and preliminary grounds to understand what types of community education and health models may be possible in Upper Manhattan, and what types of concerns are in the minds of youth.

CSD’s framework grounds itself on the interconnectedness of various sectors, especially between education and health. Thus the “track” established within the Uptown Hub program was titled “Public Health & Community Education”.

Laying the foundation of contents with the public health and education expertise within Center for Sustainable Development, the core contents began with:

The concepts illustrating community-based, inter-sectoral linkages of health and education lay the foundation for awareness and knowledge. From there, tips and considerations were discussed for activism and advocacy, while addressing broader life and soft skills with guest speakers:

  • Mental Wellness and Coping Strategies by Joyce Ku (Certified School Counselor)
  • Nutrition, Quick Wins, Healthy Habits and Local Resource Tips by Amy Chen (Licensed Dietitian and Nutritionist)
  • STEM Activity Kits to alleviate digital fatigue (CSD - Kent State partner, Dr.Joanne Caniglia)
  • Communications with Brighton Kaoma (Student of Initiative on Communication & Sustainability of The Earth Institute, Columbia University)

Each week, the 3-hour Zoom sessions were broken into two meetings per week and Interns were assigned upto 6 hours of assignments that involved desktop research, readings, surveys and feedback, reflection and journaling, group work, team presentations, creation of video and audio clips on public health issues.

The assignments and research built towards a group project, which were chosen by the Interns based on the issues they wanted to help address in their own communities: Nutrition, Mental Wellness and Substance Abuse.

The takeaways and project summary can be found here: https://youtu.be/3OlcEv5Wa64

We plan to take the contents of this course as a basis to curate a free online module, that can be applicable to not just health issues, but to broader sustainability, climate change and ecological and societal issues. Stay tuned!

We would like to thank New York-Presbyterian and Uptown Hub program for this collaboration, and the speakers who shared their expertise with the Interns of this Track. THANK YOU.