2022 Outreach and Engagement Funded Grant Proposals

2022 Outreach and Engagement Funded Impact Grant Proposals

The following 2022 Outreach and Engagement Impact Grants have been selected for funding. This year, $204,710 was awarded at a maximum amount of $20,000 to support development of impact reports for programs, performances or exhibits; development of a public policy document or impact report; development or implementation of a program, performance, exhibition, or initiative based upon previous research, assessment, or public input; or enhance or expand a program that extends community access to the university, broadly defined.

Scioto County is designated as a "Distressed Area in the Appalachian Region" due to its shrinking economy and an addiction crisis. Poverty, geographic isolation, lack of adequate transportation, acute provider shortage, and parental low health literacy are contributing factors to oral health disparities in the region. The focus of this work is to address oral health inequities that affect our most vulnerable population, low-income children in rural Ohio. Tooth decay is mostly a preventable disease if children receive early and routine preventive dental services. However, the utilization of dental services in the region remains low.

SciAccess, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing disability equity and access in STEM. This grant will allow us to develop the four SciAccess branches hand-in-hand with the community of stakeholders essential to its success. Accessibility efforts must be made with and by members of disabled communities: it is essential that our team from Ohio State engages both accessibility researchers and disabled STEM professionals in proposal development. Funds will allow us to hold fully-accessible meetings with the development team (including ASL interpreting and captioning) and partially support team members for their efforts to develop this proposal.

The Ohio Youth Resilience Collaborative (OYRC) is a partnership between the colleges of Education and Human Ecology, Public Health, and Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in collaboration with local community schools, social workers, and public health agencies throughout Ohio. OYRC's mission is to promote youth resilience and empower families and communities through a wide range of evidence-based prevention programming focused on substance abuse, mental health, suicide, and relationship building. Our proposal aims to reverse the trend of declining in-person family engagement by removing transportation and cultural barriers to engaging in-person family-based prevention programming.

The focus of this pilot project is Arab American mothers who face barriers when seeking maternal and reproductive health services from public health and healthcare providers in Northwest Ohio. This is a student-led (Siwaar Abouhala, community health student, Tufts University) faculty-supported (Hyder) community engagement project. The primary research question informing this project is: What barriers impact access to and use of maternal health services, including reproductive health, (i.e., prenatal care, postpartum care, pediatric care, OB/GYN, family planning, social services) among Arab Americans in Toledo/Lucas County, Ohio?

Most Dialogic Reading (DR) interventions to date have primarily focused on mothers and their preschoolers, excluding fathers despite their positive roles in their preschoolers' early school readiness. To directly address this community-identified need, researchers from the College of Social Work and staff from Action For Children, a community agency providing fatherhood programming to underserved fathers, are partnering in a Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) project. The proposed CBPR project is a new initiative and will be a pilot project that involves co-developing and co-implementing a father-centric virtual DR intervention, Daddy Reads with Me (DREAM), with Black non-resident fathers and their preschoolers.

The proposed project seeks to develop a Multicomponent Cultural Competency Training Program accessible in an asynchronous online format focused on the Bhutanese refugee community to address the communities' concern for culturally and linguistically appropriate care through the collaborative development, implementation, and evaluation of a cultural competency training series targeted to local health and human service providers. The project will be implemented in three phases:

  • Phase I: Co-conceptualization of the training program will be conducted with the community partner and representatives of local human service organizations.
  • Phase II: Human Service Provider Survey.
  • Phase III: Training module development and feedback.

To address the intersecting factors that perpetuate systemic inequalities in the arts ecosystem, our research team composed of Ohio State faculty, students, and alumnae is currently implementing a Race, Equity, and Social Justice in the Arts Certificate Program. This certificate will provide advanced cultural competence training to future arts leaders while simultaneously making high-quality arts education accessible to under-resourced localities. Importantly, our certificate program builds educational spaces for multicultural affirmation through service-learning coursework that provides free arts programming within Columbus K-12 schools.

Read It Again! (RIA) is a low-cost practitioner-friendly early childhood curriculum that targets the skills important to kindergarten readiness (e.g., print referencing, vocabulary, phonological awareness). The purpose of this project and our funding request is to evaluate the expansion of RIA in the Linden and Whitehall communities to identify an implementation process that (a) creates provider buy-in, (b) supports the fidelity of RIA delivery at a larger (and less cost-intensive) scale, and (c) supports the development of learning communities to enhance and sustain provider implementation and collaboration around RIA practice.

Research from the Scientific Committee on Opioid Prevention and Education (SCOPE) a collaboration between the Ohio Attorney General's Office and academic experts from across the health sciences at many Ohio higher education institutions in substance use disorder (SUD) identified a gap in healthcare provider training for SUD (Ojeda, Chen, Miracle, Delaney, Freiermuth and Sprague, 2022). In response, the Ohio AG's office formed a faculty committee from across the state representing various healthcare professional programs. The committee has developed educational content for an asynchronous course, which includes virtual escape room activities to teach health science students an interprofessional approach to the care of patients with SUD. After the program's initial development, we identified ways to increase its scope: adding new modules and virtual escape room activities.

The Wexner Center for the Arts (Wex) will use this grant to enhance and expand its burgeoning Community Studios program involving free arts classes and activities with a focus on youth and under-resourced neighborhoods. Organized at the request of partners across the city, Community Studios is a highly responsive endeavor that fosters creative expression, connection, and well-being ever more essential during the isolation of the pandemic. In its pilot year the initiative engaged nearly 300 participants in more than 45 sessions across multiple sites. Across our work, we will focus on the overarching goals of promoting independent inquiry, exploration, and growth; deepening social and cultural capacities within communities; and promoting community safety, stability, well-being, and care.

The "Senior to Senior" program connects advanced undergraduate students (i.e., "seniors") with older residents (i.e., the other "seniors") surrounding the Ohio State Lima campus for weekly chats. After a pretest interview with residents, students made weekly calls to the residents for about 8-10 weeks, then made a final call to conduct a post-test interview. This program was piloted in Spring 2021 with my Adult Development course on the Lima campus (six students). This engagement grant would provide the resources to scale up this program to a broader range of volunteers and older adults as my developmental courses are always small on the Lima campus.