2023 Outreach and Engagement Funded Impact Grant Proposals

This project seeks to strengthen an existing partnership with Proyecto Mariposas, a Columbus non-profit organization that supports Latino girls and mothers that have recently immigrated to the U.S. Since 2019 Proyecto Mariposas has been a partner of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese (SPPO), providing 37 internships to students that have completed over 1,700 service hours. By serving Latino girls and mothers, many of whom have uncertain legal status and may never return to their home countries, Proyecto Mariposas provides a sense of belonging for families as they navigate new social and geographical contexts. Proyecto Mariposas is sustained by grants and donors, and throughout our partnership SPPO has witnessed a need for capacity building. This project aims to support capacity building, to document the perspectives of Columbus Latino communities, and to provide sustained opportunities for OSU students to participate in service-learning research.

Educational programs focused on improved beef management practices are critical in producing the safest, highest-quality beef possible. With 16,922 Ohio Beef farm families, many are engaged in these types of programs. However, many remain untouched, specifically in the Appalachian region of Ohio. Beef Quality Assurance (BQA) is a producer educational program developed to ensure beef and dairy cattle are maintained in a manner that result in a safe and wholesome beef product. The National Stockmanship & Stewardship Program is an expanded version of BQA. Objectives:

1. Provide producer education in a hands-on learning environment, where producers can ask questions, seek guidance and view applicable handling facilities.
2. Demonstrate low stress animal handling methods to enhance cattle welfare while increasing human safety when working with large livestock to use on their own operations.
3. Assessment of environmental stewardship on-farm and how producers can make impactful improvements on their operations.
4. Individuals will attain Beef Quality Assurance Certification for three years.

For almost five years, the Charles Madison Nabrit Memorial Garden (CMNMG) - OSU Community-Academic Partnership has worked to alleviate the injustices of urban food apartheid (Reynolds & Cohen, 2016; Penniman, 2018) and increase access to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education (London et al., 2020; Harper, 2010) within a community of color adjacent to campus. Our partnership revolves around a community garden, the Charles Madison Nabrit Memorial Garden located on the grounds of a historic Black Church, The Church of Christ of the Apostolic Faith. The Church is a congregation formed in 1910 by descendants of formerly enslaved Africans. The Garden is a 5,000-square-foot, organic, bio-diverse, self-sustaining space situated in a previously fallow field behind the Church. Through the installation and development of a farming robot and other engineering solutions, and a suite of informal learning opportunities for learners of all ages, we have positioned the Garden as a context for integrated arts and STEM Education (STEAM).

Irrepressible Soul is a collaborative project, introspective exhibition, and community-engaged programming centered around recognizing and celebrating the complex and intersectional Black experience and identity. This project represents an expansion of an existing initiative to create a more comprehensive, robust, and inclusive curricular model. This model actively explores, and incorporates through action-based research, what it means to mobilize efforts that promote arts equity, accessibility, and authentic collaborations to remain culturally responsive to dynamic needs of communities. Art should be available to all, but it is often a luxury for few. Through Irrepressible Soul, a month-long series of arts-based research and arts and cultural programming, Urban Arts Space explores the Black Aesthetic and Black experience. Urban Arts Space seeks to engage in community-based conversations with partners to collaboratively develop the project and experiment with how art is imagined, made, viewed, and understood.

This project is a partnership between Metro High School and the Dennis Learning Center (DLC) to teach high school students research-based learning strategies that support academic success and resilience. Metro has been building a Senior Communications program for the past decade. Currently, all senior students at Metro meet weekly in small, teacher-guided class sessions. The partnership will grow the program by providing engaging workshops for Metro seniors to help them as they progress beyond high school. Target areas include life skills and insights related to academic success in college, as well as managing the social-emotional elements of college life. The aim is to build on academic skills to speak to issues that are meaningful to the whole student to ensure their physical, social, and emotional well-being for years to come.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is considered one of the "signature injuries" of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (Institute of Medicine, 2012), and is the most frequently diagnosed mental health condition among veterans of these conflicts (Tanielian & Jaycox, 2008). PTSD is associated with a host of functional problems and negative outcomes, including occupational and marital dissatisfaction, violence, alcohol and substance abuse, and suicide (Hoge et al., 2004; Jakupcak et al., 2007; Panagioti, Gooding, & Tarrier, 2009). Cognitive behavioral treatments tend to be the most highly efficacious treatments for PTSD. Enhancing Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy with procedures that have been shown to significantly reduce suicidal thoughts and behaviors could serve to further reduce suicide risk during and after treatment completion. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) has been increasingly used by researchers as a tool for understanding real-time fluctuations in suicide risk and their relationships with other psychological and contextual variables. In the proposed study, we will use EMA to track crisis response plan (CRP) usage during and after intervention. Our long-term goal is to prevent suicides among individuals diagnosed with PTSD by integrating trauma-focused therapies with suicide-focused interventions. The primary objective of this pilot project is to test the efficacy of PE when enhanced with the CRP utilizing self-report, behavioral, and ecological assessment methods to compare treatment effects.

In this expansion project, farm mothers will be empowered to become educators by curating a photography exhibit in their communities so that farm, non-farm, and decision-maker audiences become aware of their realities and solutions for childcare. This project is timely as two U.S. senators have drafted a bill to support childcare through the 2023 Farm Bill. This project will add to and expand conversations regarding the national need for access to affordable, quality childcare for all Americans. This project builds off a 5-year research project funded by the CDC National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and explores the links between childcare, farm safety, and farm business viability.

Latinx in STEM is a new astronomy and STEM outreach initiative created as an extension of the OSU Department of Astronomy Planetariums Program. Latinx in STEM aims to: (1) expose the Hispanic/Latinx community, which includes parents and K-12 students, to astronomy by hosting OSU planetarium shows in Spanish, (2) provide astronomy and STEM educational opportunities to underrepresented minority and low-income groups in Columbus and neighboring rural communities, with emphasis on the Hispanic/Latinx population, (3) provide travel support for low-income community schools to attend activities, including visits to the Spanish planetarium shows. We plan to build and design 30-minute planetarium shows in Spanish at OSUs Planetarium. Astronomy topics that will be covered will range from the constellations in the night skies, Solar System structure, the origin of chemical elements, and the evolution of galaxies.

Current Ohio 2020-2022 data estimations report there are approximately 117,000 children being raised by a relative, and for every child raised by kin in foster care, there are 34 children being raised by relatives outside of foster care. These families, known as grandfamilies, face many struggles and challenges, one such challenge is access to oral health. According to the 2020-2021 National Survey of Childrens Health data, 53.6% of children aged 1-5, 18.9% of 611-year-olds, and 23.3% of 1217-year-olds had not had a preventive dental visit in the past year. Data from this same survey indicated that 33.7% lived with a grandparent and 40.2% lived with a relative. In an effort to increase oral health access to underserved and underrepresented communities, such as children being raised by a grandparent or other relative, OFHESJ has collaborated with agencies and organizations across the state to work on a project that will influence policy changes to oral health care through increased, improved, and sustainable school-based dental health services.

This project will encompass the outreach and education stages of a multiphase project designed to improve advance care planning in central Ohios Muslim-American community. Our initial research is providing us with evidence-based understanding of barriers to advance care planning in this community. This grant will facilitate our efforts to develop and disseminate culturally sensitive educational interventions to both this community and medical staff as a result of knowledge we have gained through our research studies. Uncertainty around end-of-life decision-making can extend intensive care hospitalizations and cause significant moral distress, conflict, and grief among families, patients and medical teams. This timely and important project will improve patient care, address racial and ethnic disparities and health equity, empower OSUs medical staff to engage with patients in culturally sensitive ways, and facilitate trust and connection between OSU and community populations, specifically the Muslim-American community.

Since 2015, the Daughter Sister Mother Project team has been conducting community-engaged, mixed-methods studies of how diverse women at high risk of breast cancer learn about and cope with their cancer risk. Medical interventions exist that can dramatically reduce the risks of illness and death for women at high breast cancer risk due to predisposing genetic mutations or family history of the disease, but the majority of high-risk women do not use these interventions. Before we began our research, the scientific literature lacked attention to the perspective of high-risk women themselves. It also lacked consideration of important racial health disparities in risk management. Our qualitative and quantitative studies with Black and white women have been systematically filling these gaps. To date, we have documented the psychosocial, interpersonal, and structural facilitators of empowered risk-management decisions among high-risk women, and distinct racial disparities in access to all those facilitators. These findings have been published in general science, public health, and cancer specific journals.

The goal of this project is to expand on an existing initiative, the Pride and Life Skills mentoring program (PALS), which is a cooperative venture between The Ohio State University at Marion, Marion Mentors, and Marion Public Schools. PALS connects college students from the Marion campus with children in the Marion area to provide one-on-one mentoring opportunities for younger students. Marion Mentors matches program volunteers with school-age children and provides them with the necessary resources and support to direct them through the mentoring process. Students earn 1 credit per semester of independent study by attending mentoring sessions regularly, coming to meetings to discuss their experiences, and critically reflecting on their mentoring activities. With this grant, we will (1) recruit additional students into the program; (2) provide new leadership opportunities for students who have served as PALS mentors; (3) create additional sources of peer support for PALS mentors.

The LGBTQ+ Friendly Aging project extends the work of the Age-Friendly Innovation Center (AFIC), Age-Friendly Columbus and Franklin County (AFCFC), a program of the Ohio State University College of Social Work. AFCFC is part of the five-year Age-Friendly cycle that focus on addressing the eight domains of livability (housing, transportation, social participation, community and health services, outdoor spaces and buildings, social participation, respect and social inclusion, work and civic engagement, and communication and information) defined by the World Health Organization and adopted by AARP network of Age-Friendly communities to better serve the needs of older adults. AFCFC has prioritized hearing from diverse voices of stakeholders. While these approaches have engaged many diverse communities, a major gap in this work has been hearing from local LGBTQ+ older adults.

This grant will support the expansion of the Wexner Centers Community Studios, which engage underserved neighborhoods and populations across the city. Piloted in 2021 during the pandemic, these programs feature free arts-integrated activities and classes for all ages, led by local teaching artists. The Wex works collaboratively with community partners, who request these programs from the Wex to fill unmet needsand this year, the center has identified several new locations for these offerings, including venues on the Hilltop, in German Village, and on the South Side, while deepening its relationship with Godman Guild downtown. Since its inception, the program has served more than 1,700 participants during more than 100 free studio sessions, ranging from painting to ceramics to DJing. The expansion includes new partnerships with the Schiller Community Center in Schiller Park serving adults from the South Side, Merion Village, downtown, and German Village areas, and the Maryhaven Residential and Outpatient Treatment Center on the South Side, which also houses a gambling intervention program and engagement center.