Health and Human Services

Natalie Sampson named Distinguished Professor of the Year

lblouin — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 12:32:16 +0000

Natalie Sampson named Distinguished Professor of the Year lblouin Wed, 04/16/2025 - 08:32

Anyone who knows Natalie Sampson knows one of her more endearing (and perhaps Midwestern) traits is her reluctance to be in the spotlight — even when the attention is obviously due. Whenever we interview her about her work, which often has some connection to grassroots community organizations, she is quick to play up others’ hard work and contributions and lower the volume on her own. So it’s unsurprising that it's been a little uncomfortable for Sampson since the Michigan Association of State Universities shared that she had been selected as one of three Distinguished Professors of the Year for 2025. The news wasn't even public yet and Sampson was already sweating whether the invitations for her allotted guest list of seven for the Lansing awards ceremony should include her colleagues. "I didn’t want to bug them — ask them to drive to Lansing. They’re busy!” Sampson says, laughing. Luckily, her longtime friend and collaborator, the straight-talking Associate Professor of Sociology Carmel Price, told her to get over it. "She was, like, ‘They’re going to be upset if you don’t ask them.’”

Sampson’s aversion to attention is perhaps amplified a bit by the fact that, for much of her life, she’s not always been exactly comfortable in the world of academia. She says she definitely did not grow up with an eye on becoming an academic. Her father, who was an airline mechanic, and her mother, who was a customer service representative, grew up in an era where college degrees weren’t necessarily seen as prerequisites for solid, well-paying jobs. But both she and her older sister excelled in school, and their parents were huge cheerleaders when their daughters landed at the University of Michigan. In retrospect, Sampson sees it as a moment of generational transition in her own family — and one that also says something about the region. “My parents grew up at a time when it was Papa Ford and Papa Chevrolet, and people did quite well for a very long time without going to college,” Sampson says. “So for my family, this college thing was a different trajectory — especially because my sister studied sociology and I did environmental studies. I was lucky because my family was always very supportive. But I think there was this curiosity about what this would translate to.”

It took a little exploration during her undergraduate years at U-M to find her niche. Sampson says she gravitated to her major because she liked the outdoors, but not all of the coursework clicked: “I remember taking the woody plants class and memorizing all the different Latin names and the different kinds of acorns and thought, ‘Well, I’m definitely not going to be a conservationist,’” she says. However, through U-M’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, which is akin to 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, she found something that was a little more her speed. She got paired with a faculty member who was doing research around the health impacts of truck traffic on people living in neighborhoods near Detroit’s Ambassador Bridge. During her assignment, she got to talk with dozens of people in the neighborhood and witness some of the inner workings of grassroots community organizations. “I remember thinking, ‘This is research? If this is research, then I like research,’” she says.

It was indeed research — or a particular brand of research that was coming of age in the public health discipline at that time. Sampson says beginning in the late 1980s, some academics in the field were going through a bit of a what-is-it-all-for moment. There was an impulse to not simply use research to document, say, epidemiological trends, but to try to more deliberately use the data to actually improve, well, the public’s health. This sometimes meant interacting more directly with community organizations who were taking on big corporations or government agencies, or interrogating long-held assumptions about academic research, like the value or validity of “objectivity.” During her master’s program at Portland State University, Sampson got exposed to more examples of this kind of “action-oriented research.” During one of her internships, she collaborated closely with a small nonprofit that was working with residents on issues related to asthma. “I saw faculty listening to residents, and their experiences were shaping the research. I started to see, ‘Oh, this is how it works,’” she says.

Today, it’s easy to see the imprint of this approach on Sampson’s work. Along with Price and several partners, she co-created Environmental Health Research-to-Action, the flagship program of which is a summer academy that teaches high school students to do things like air and water quality monitoring, and to understand how environmental health science can support policy work. She’s also been working with community organizations and other academics on a plain language initiative, which is pushing government agencies like the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to use language that is understandable to everyday people, so they don’t feel alienated from decision making processes. And a few years back, during the planning stages of the Gordie Howe International Bridge — a project that promised to bring a vast amount of truck traffic to a neighborhood already burdened by poor air quality — her team’s community health survey of residents in Southwest Detroit helped push the city and state to agree to a landmark $45 million community benefits package. That agreement included an unprecedented relocation program that provided some residents of Detroit’s Delray neighborhood with the option of moving to a renovated Detroit Land Bank home. In typical Sampson fashion, she’s quick to point out that, in her opinion, her work made an impact because the timing was right. “This result is 100% due to the fact that this group had been organizing for 10 or 20 years, but they took that data and used that to support their argument for this community benefits agreement,” she says. “At that moment, the data just fit into that story.” Now, she says, another group, which is trying to get the city to design truck routes that don’t go through residential neighborhoods is using similar data that their community-academic teams are continuing to collect. The organizers’ work recently prompted the city to propose a new truck route ordinance.

Several years ago, Valeria Cossyleon, right, and Janine Hussein, left, were among the students who helped Sampson collect door-to-door health surveys in Detroit's Delray neighborhood. Photo by Lou Blouin

That community organizations, who are good at community organizing, and academics, who are good at collecting and presenting data, could collaborate in practical ways to improve the public’s health is something that makes intuitive sense. But in practice, Sampson says it doesn’t always work smoothly. As she sees it, the key ingredient is trust: University researchers who aren’t from the community, and who might speak in technical jargon, are often greeted with a healthy degree of skepticism by local residents, who don’t know how durable or broad their allyship is. Sampson says there were plenty of times early in her career where her status as an academic made her feel out of place in community meetings. But that has changed over time — and because of time. Trust, she says, is built through relationships, and relationships don’t arise out of thin air. Nowadays, she rarely feels that kind of awkwardness, namely because she’s been working with the same communities for years, sometimes decades. “That’s one reason I feel like it’s been a blessing for me to come to 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. I got to come back and work with people that I worked with as an undergrad when I was 20 years old,” she says. “Simone Sagovac, who now runs the Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition, I know I have a picture of us somewhere at some meeting and I’m 20 years old, and I have an eyebrow pierced, and I’m not dressed professionally. And now here we are, a couple decades later, and we’re older ladies, some of us with gray hair, still working together, still trying to collect the data, because there’s so much frickin’ work to do.”

In the classroom, Sampson is always nudging her students to think about the practical applications of environmental health science too. She says she’s benefited greatly from teaching the same two courses — Community Organizing and Introduction to Environmental Health — for years now, which has enabled her to continually refine the curriculum. One of her go-to assignments in her environmental health class is to ask each student to bring in their municipal drinking water quality report, which local utilities are required to provide to residents. It’s a simple but powerful prompt. For one, many students discover for the first time things about their drinking water that aren’t great. And even the sheer challenge of deciphering these technical reports reveals that government documents aren’t always presenting important scientific data in ways that are easily understood — which in turns, stunts residents’ abilities to push their public officials when there is a problem. And for many semesters in her community organizing course, it’s been a staple assignment for students to partner with community groups on practical projects, like a collaboration a few years ago where students helped a group in south Dearborn write a grant proposal to support their work around air quality. She also recently did something she thought she’d never do: create a textbook. It has a benign sounding name: “Environmental Health: Foundations for Public Health.” But the content, featuring contributions from a diverse range of leading voices in the field, is far edgier, emphasizing the broad scope of the discipline, including the community-based approaches that originally inspired her.

Now a couple decades into her own public health journey, Sampson senses she might be entering a moment of transition. She says it’s a little weird to look around and see that she’s now one of three senior faculty members in the Health and Human Services Department. One of her colleagues, who’s just a little younger than her, recently recoiled when she casually referred to them both as “middle age.” And she’s also increasingly interested in exploring other approaches in her quest to make environmental health science universally accessible, including ones that utilize the arts. She’s also feeling more of a generational divide in the classroom, especially the past few years. In particular, she’s observing an increasing reluctance of students to talk — “like, at all” — in class, something she attributes a little bit to COVID, but mostly to the fact that young people’s lives are increasingly lived online. It’s something she can sort of relate to. “I never talked in class as an undergrad,” she says. “And I’m definitely sympathetic to students who are feeling anxiety about that. But many of them are going to be clinicians. A huge part of their jobs is going to be talking to people. So you have to practice. Definitely, one of my biggest priorities as an instructor is just creating any opportunity to make them talk.”

She also tries to keep their spirits up. Public health can, frankly, be a depressing subject much of the time, and she does feel like younger generations are living with a different kind of weight on their shoulders as they realize most of their lives will be lived in the climate change era. During her periodic efforts to bring them up to speed on current events, she makes sure to find at least some good news from the world. And it’s now one of her standard assignments to challenge them to do something for their mental health. (This semester, they are listening to a playlist of songs, crowd-sourced from the class, that get them pumped up.) She concedes that this kind of positivity can sometimes be a “performance.” But it’s also something that keeps her own motor going. “It’s funny: Sometimes I feel like I’m just getting started. And some days I feel like I’m ready to retire!” she says. “But there are always opportunities to reinvent.”

###

Story by Lou Blouin

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Wed, 04/16/2025 - 12:30

The associate professor of public health talks about her sometimes uncomfortable relationship with academia, the politics of community-centered research and the challenge of getting today’s students to talk in class.

Associate Professor of Public Health Natalie Sampson, far right, says she loves that she's been able to teach the same two courses for much of her career, which has allowed her to both experiment with and refine the curriculum. Photo by Annie Barker

Class of Spring 2025: CEHHS graduate Marjani Abdur-Rahman

lblouin — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 14:41:21 +0000

Class of Spring 2025: CEHHS graduate Marjani Abdur-Rahman lblouin Mon, 04/14/2025 - 10:41

Growing up, there was never much doubt that Marjani Abdur-Rahman would go to college. In fact, in high school, she dreamed, probably in more detail than most students, about what that experience would look like. Her mom, a social worker who graduated from Michigan State University, was her academic and professional role model, which is why Abdur-Rahman planned to major in clinical psychology. And she was excited to soak up many of the other quintessential parts of college life: living in the dorms, joining a sorority and partying on the weekends with her friends.

Abdur-Rahman enrolled at 51��Ƶ-Flint in 2008 and got off to a fast start. She took advantage of the fact that the university had just built on-campus housing and moved into the dorms. She declared a major in clinical psychology and a minor in Spanish. She also threw her energy into numerous student organizations — including lobbying successfully to charter a new chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho, a historically Black sorority, on the Flint campus. She was also intent on not taking on more debt than necessary, so she balanced a full-time course load with several part-time jobs: one at the university restaurant, another as an assistant manager at rue21 in the local mall, and a third working the night shift at a Speedway convenience store.

The night of Dec. 9, 2012, though, abruptly brought an end to that busy, but hopeful rhythm of life. Abdur-Rahman was out with her friend when they ran into the friend's ex-boyfriend. While they were at the club, Abdur-Rahman got into a heated argument with him over the man’s past treatment of her friend. Emotions were running high. Everyone had been drinking. At one point, Abdur-Rahman says she tried to get her friend to leave with her, but her friend wanted to see if she could smooth things over. The argument then escalated further, with the man threatening to pull a gun on Abdur-Rahman, at which point she went back to her car and retrieved a small knife from her glove compartment. She says she had no intention of using it; she thought it might get him to back down. But the argument intensified, the two yelling at each other until it reached an unimaginable moment: “Like a reflex,” Abdur-Rahman stabbed him once in the chest. After it happened, she didn’t think he was seriously injured, and she and her friend left in their car. But Abdur-Rahman learned later that he had died in the hospital. She was eventually arrested and charged with open murder, a crime carrying a potential life sentence. She ultimately agreed to a plea that reduced the charge to manslaughter, with a sentence of seven and a half to 15 years. In December 2013, after being held for 10 months at the Genesee County Jail, she began serving her sentence at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Michigan’s only women’s prison.

She says the first two years of being incarcerated were the most difficult. She describes herself as a “bubbly, fun-loving person,” but prison wasn’t a place where you could show that kind of emotion. Personal contact between people, for example, was prohibited. One day, upon seeing a friend who she knew was going through a difficult time, Abdur-Rahman reflexively reached out and embraced her — only to get sanctioned for sexual misconduct. And, of course, there was a hurricane of emotions to deal with: The guilt that came from being responsible for taking another person’s life. The nagging thoughts that if she hadn’t been drinking or hadn’t had a knife in her car that night, none of this would be happening. The fear of not knowing what the rest of her life would bring once she got out.

Even within that setting, Abdur-Rahman eventually found a rhythm. As she did when she was a college student, she participated in lots of clubs and activities in the prison. She practiced yoga and did strength and conditioning classes. She facilitated AA meetings and sang in the church choir. Through these activities, she says she developed a lot more compassion for people. “I used to be a very judgemental person, particularly with people who had substance abuse issues. I just thought, ‘Why don’t you stop? Why are you doing that to yourself?’” she says. “But after housing with a lot of women who had those issues, and speaking with them through AA and NA, I realized we had a lot in common, a lot of the same trauma. Sexual child abuse, divorced parents, abusive relationships. The only difference between me and these women is the way we coped.” She also met women who didn’t fit any of the common stereotypes of incarcerated people. People who didn’t have previous criminal records, histories of violence or challenges with addiction. People who she thought of as “good people,” who, like her, had made “one big mistake.”

At a certain point, Abdur-Rahman also started to regain some of the hope she once had for her future. She understood that it was going to be “damn near impossible to be a felon and be a psychologist,” but she started to think about adjacent careers, particularly in social work. While in prison, she met many inspiring, compassionate social workers. One woman even shared with her that she was also a felon and later got her degree. Later, when she saw that 51��Ƶ-Dearborn was offering free college classes in the prison and one of them was an introductory social work course, she didn’t hesitate to sign up. There, she learned just how broad the social work field was. She could be a therapist. A case worker. Someone who worked with people with addiction issues. There were even social workers who specialized in working with formerly incarcerated people. Some time after that, she saw a flyer for 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s SOAR program, which provides an array of support services and scholarships for adult learners and returning students who are pursuing their first bachelor's degree. It all started giving her a feeling that her deferred college dreams maybe weren't out of reach.

When she was released on parole in June 2021, her initial hope was to return to 51��Ƶ-Flint, which was much closer to her home in Saginaw. But when that didn’t work out, she immediately thought of 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. She felt “ecstatic” the day she got the acceptance letter from the university, calculating that she could finish up in just a couple of years. But heading back to college after a 10-year break posed certain challenges. “When I got arrested, we were on iPhone 4. When I got out, it was iPhone 14,” she says, adding that the tech learning curve was a bit steep. In prison, even in college classes, she could only use pen and paper. Now, students lived attached to their laptops and tracked assignments, grades and discussion groups via online learning management systems. You could even take most of your classes virtually if you wanted to. Being in a college classroom was also a bit of a culture shock. “I went from taking college classes where everyone’s in their prison garb and all you have is your pencil and paper. And, now, here I am in a classroom wearing normal clothes with a bunch of normal people. You know no one’s psychic. But you still sort of have that paranoia, like, do these people know? Can they tell? Would anyone take the time to Google me?”

At first, Abdur-Rahman says she didn’t tell anybody anything about her past. But gradually, over time, she got more comfortable talking about her experience. She credits a lot of that to her involvement in the Prison Creative Arts Project, a long-running U-M program that brings creative arts workshops into prisons. When she got out, she stayed involved with PCAP’s Linkage Community for returning citizens. She jokes that both programs have kind of made her a poster child. “I’m all over the website,” she says, noting that it’s difficult to put yourself out there like that and not end up talking about your story, at least certain parts of it. Last semester, she really stepped out of her comfort zone. The instructor of her Vulnerable Populations course, Assistant Professor of Health and Human Services Vitalis Im, who’s been working with the PCAP program for years, asked whether she’d be interested in doing a class presentation on her prison experience and some of the challenges of her post-prison life. “I was really scared to do that. I didn’t want any of my peers to look at me differently, to change their whole mindset of me. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I think people see me as a likeable, friendly person, and I didn’t want those qualities to be overlooked after sharing my story,” she says. But Abdur-Rahman says sort of the opposite happened. Afterward, she got several comments from her fellow students, basically sharing their admiration for her ability to stay so positive. And she says it’s still hard to talk about what Im’s respect and validation has meant to her without tearing up. “He’s somebody who’s only recently become part of my journey, who’s rooting for me, and wants me to succeed and has my best interests at heart,” she says. “He knows I’m a good person that just made a bad decision.”

As Abdur-Rahman approaches her graduation, she says she’s filled with a mix of emotions. On the one hand, she’s obviously feeling a huge sense of accomplishment and is excited to share the moment with all the people who’ve stuck by her. On the other hand, she’s worried about the very real possibility that her past could still get in the way of her dreams for her future. She frequently gets some reminder of that. Right now, she’s living with her mom in Saginaw, which she’s doing, in part, because her mom has some health problems. But now that she’s finishing her degree, she’d love to get her own apartment, maybe move to a new city. She knows, however, that she’ll probably have to find a place that doesn’t require a background check. And just recently, while working at one of her jobs, a sales floor position at a national chain store, her manager asked if she could chat with her in the office. The manager explained that her background check had been flagged and that a woman on the phone from the company’s HR department wanted to ask her some questions about the events of Dec. 9, 2012. Put on the spot at work, Abdur-Rahman took the phone and calmly explained what had happened, as well as all the things she has been doing with her life since. She also noted that if the job application had asked about criminal history, which she says it did not, she would have volunteered that information. After the phone call, she then turned to her manager, who had heard the conversation, and expressed that she hoped that she didn’t think differently of her now. The manager responded that she did not, and reiterated what an excellent worker she was and that if it was up to her, she'd be happy to send Abdur-Rahman right back to work. Nonetheless, she was going to be suspended pending a decision from HR, though she ultimately got to keep her job. “That’s just sort of my reality now,” she says. “I feel like no matter how hard I try, it’s two steps forward, and then five steps back. It’s hard not to get discouraged, but I’m trying to stay positive.”

Going forward, Abdur-Rahman still very much desires to have what she calls a “big girl job,” which she defines as “a job of substance with good pay and a 9 to 5.” Ideally, she wants to find a position where she can help people with substance abuse issues. But she also anticipates it will be hard for many employers — even those in the social work field — to look beyond her past, especially if they have other talented candidates they could hire. She also knows she’ll likely need to continue her education. A bachelor’s degree in the field doesn’t take you as far as it used to, which is why she’s applied to 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor’s master of social work program. She recently received news that she’s been put on an alternates list. “So it’s not a ‘no’ and not a ‘yes,’” she says. She should know in a couple months whether she got in. Some parts of her life are still a waiting game.

###

Story by Lou Blouin

Commencement

Student Success

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Mon, 04/14/2025 - 14:41

As she approaches a milestone that once seemed out of reach, the health and human services major is trying to not let the worst mistake of her life define the rest of it.

Photo by Annie Barker

Serving women who’ve served their country

stuxbury — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 18:08:46 +0000

Serving women who’ve served their country stuxbury Wed, 03/26/2025 - 14:08

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed a bipartisan bill to create a Michigan license plate for women veterans last November. The request for the license plate came from women veterans themselves — and grew from a 51��Ƶ-Dearborn-facilitated effort.

Students Katie Dreher and Hannah Stovall participated in the “Same Mission, Many Stories: Dialogues with Women Veterans” project at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. They helped facilitate conversations with women veterans, giving them opportunities to share their experiences and listen to the stories of others. The students shared their findings at the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency’s Women Veterans Conference in fall 2023.

“We presented a list of what women veterans wanted during a statewide veterans conference, including the license plate,” Dreher says. “These women have already given so much. I was proud to give them a voice in front of all those people.”

“Same Mission, Many Stories” — an initiative of Michigan Humanities’ Community Conversations program — took place at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn and Saginaw Valley State University in 2023 and included women veterans from all branches of the military.

At 51��Ƶ-Dearborn, 25 metro Detroit-area veterans participated in facilitated discussions — led by Professor of Sociology Francine Banner, Professor of Health and Human Services Lisa Martin and students — about challenges they faced while serving in the military. 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s Veterans Affairs Coordinator Tom Pitock reached out through his many military service-related networks across the state to let women veterans know about this opportunity.

Professor of Sociology Francine Banner

Martin — who is also 51��Ƶ-Dearborn’s Women and Gender Studies program director — says the “Same Mission, Many Stories” project not only reached policymakers, it also documented the history of challenges facing women veterans. “We need to record these narratives to better understand people’s life experiences so that they can be properly addressed. With the erasure that is happening in today’s society, work like this is so important. We don’t want to lose history, even when it’s a difficult topic to look at. We need to learn from it,” says Martin, noting that all participating veterans were assured anonymity since many of them talked about traumatic experiences.

“These veterans have experienced difficult emotional fallouts from their workplace that includes silence, shame and isolation. Sharing stories in a group setting builds connection and trust and reduces isolation,” Martin continues.

Stovall, a senior who transferred to 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor last year and is majoring in public health, says the six weeks of facilitation training and practice she received prepared her to guide discussions. Stovall learned methods to move conversations forward in engaging and productive ways, such as using open-ended prompts, demonstrating nonverbal cues like nodding, and redirecting discussions when they stray too far from the topic at hand. For example, Stovall and Dreher used a picture of a service person coming home from deployment and being greeted by family to encourage the veterans to open up about their experiences. Martin notes that this technique is one way to spark a deep, complex conversation without making any one person’s feel too vulnerable.

Professor of Health and Human Services Lisa Martin

Banner — who, along with Martin, supported the students during the sessions — says the photo elicited feelings of reconnection and concerns about reacclimation. It also brought up challenges women veterans face after coming home. “The need for child care and women's health care services was frequently brought up,” she says. “Many of the conversations had a similar theme — there need to be more resources that focus on the needs of women veterans.”

There are more than 230,000 women actively serving in the military today. “Women are serving in combat zones in very dangerous situations. When looking at the contemporary military and the women who are actively serving, that’s more than 17 percent, but they are still marginalized and their service is not recognized at the same level,” Banner says. “But they have challenges that men do not because they have to navigate a very masculine environment while in the service and afterward when working with the VA. As more women continue to join the military and serve their country, it’s important to look at ways to help these service members and veterans be supported and seen.”

Other recurring themes in the conversations included sexual harassment and assault, the improper fit of male-designed equipment, the job pressures of post-pregnancy weight loss, a lack of women-focused health care services and interacting with people who assume a male partner is the veteran.

Ashley Ross, the former director of programs and a current facilitator with Michigan Humanities, says the work that took place at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn impacted programming across the state. “During the 2023 conference, the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency took note. They realized that these conversations were getting people to listen and to share their needs. The MVAA became interested in expanding this work,” she says.

A second phase of the project will expand to all 10 of the MVAA’s regions — which covers the entire state — and will include additional underrepresented populations in the military. Banner will continue to be involved with the program as an advisor. “We are going to use the dialogue model we used at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn and expand it so we can bring different voices into the conversation, for example the experiences of African American veterans and LGBTQ veterans,” Banner says.

Ross says the intent is to continue to connect veterans with government agencies and policymakers. “We know that change cannot always be made, especially right away,” Ross says. “But if people listen to each other and a trust is built, more productive conversations can take place that can lead to a place of understanding. This project shows how important it is just to be heard and acknowledged.”

And that is where the license plate — which will be out in November 2025, according to the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency — comes in.

“The women wanted a license plate because it is one tangible way for these veterans to feel seen. One veteran told us about how she has a standard veterans license plate on her car and people often tell her to thank her husband for his service. When she shared her story, others said the same thing had happened to them,” says Dreher, who graduated with a degree in psychology last semester and is preparing for graduate school while working as a Michigan School of Medicine Research Assistant intern in pediatric neuropsychology.

Dreher and Stovall saw how beneficial the “Same Mission, Many Stories” project was and say it was a memorable experience that will guide them as they enter therapy-based careers in health settings.

“With a future career in public health, I want to learn about different interventions that benefit people — and veterans are such a huge part of the population,” Stovall says. “Hearing the experiences these women have had let me know that extra support is needed to lift them up. The ‘Same Mission, Many Stories’ program helped me see how I could do that by creating a community, encouraging people to share their stories and advocating for their needs.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Behavioral Sciences

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Wed, 03/26/2025 - 18:08

“Same Mission, Many Stories” gave women veterans a safe place to share their experiences and needs, while providing 51��Ƶ-Dearborn students with therapy-based skills to use in their future careers.

Students Hannah Stovall, left, and Katie Dreher participated in the “Same Mission, Many Stories" project. In this 2023 photo, they presented at the Michigan Veterans Affairs Agency’s Women Veterans Conference. Photo by Lisa Martin

Time is NOW: Working Towards Environmental Justice

shumwong — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 20:34:38 +0000

Time is NOW: Working Towards Environmental Justice shumwong Fri, 03/21/2025 - 16:34

Learn about current challenges and opportunities for ensuring a healthy environment for all in Metro Detroit.

Light refreshments will be provided. Open to all!

Limited Capacity. RSVP now!

2025-04-08T18:00:00-0400 to2025-04-08T19:30:00-0400

Environmental Interpretive Center

EIC

4901 Evergreen Rd
Dearborn, MI 48128
United States

https://goo.gl/maps/XpZNtb71UUrNfWTQ8

51��Ƶ-Dearborn Environmental Interpretative Center

United States

On Campus

51��Ƶ-Dearborn Environmental Interpretative Center and College of Education, Health, Human Services

Natalie Sampson - nsampson@umich.edu

RSVP: Working towards Environmental Justice

Everyone

Environmental Interpretive Center

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Environmental Health and Safety

Study Abroad: Bicycle Urbanism - Michigan & Scandinavia Information Session

shumwong — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 18:06:06 +0000

Study Abroad: Bicycle Urbanism - Michigan & Scandinavia Information Session shumwong Tue, 03/11/2025 - 14:06

Bicycle Urbanism will explore the ways in which cities are designed to support humans (versus automobiles). Riding a bicycle “changes how we experience our cities” (Piatkowski, 2024). Through an exploration of bicycling, students will dig into topics such as culture, inequality, poverty, public health, public policy, sustainability, transportation infrastructure, universal accessibility, and urban design. Students will explore practices and policies that foster safe, convenient, and accessible bicycle infrastructure and the underlying culture that supports high (or low) rates of bicycle and other non-motorized transportation use in multiple cities in Michigan and Scandinavia. The program will start in Southeastern Michigan (meeting on and around the Dearborn campus) and then continue to Scandinavia where we will visit the cities of Copenhagen (Denmark), Gothenburg (Sweden), and Oslo (Norway). Students are not required to own a bike, however, they must be comfortable riding one. Ultimately, we will learn “not about making cities better for bikes but making cities better with bikes” (Piatkowski, 2024).

2025-04-08T16:00:00-0400 to2025-04-08T17:30:00-0400

Mardigian Library

4901 Evergreen Rd
Dearborn, MI 48128
United States

https://goo.gl/maps/KpjstvfjSq1ZSNdt9

1st Floor

United States

On Campus

Carmel Price, Natalie Sampson

carmelp@umich.edu, nsampson@umich.edu

Admitted Students

Current Students

Graduate Admissions;Graduate Students

Transfer Students

Undergraduate students

Graduate students

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Education

Health and Human Services

Info Session

Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia

lblouin — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 15:49:08 +0000

Vitalis Im’s winding, unexpected path to academia lblouin Mon, 01/20/2025 - 10:49

Violinist. Opera singer. Therapist. Professor and researcher. Vitalis Im, the Health and Human Services Department’s newest assistant professor, has collected a list of life experiences that makes you think a career in academia wasn’t always his life goal. Indeed, Im says that is entirely true, and, in fact, it was far from a sure thing he'd even attend college. Growing up in a low-income family in rural upstate New York, the only Asian American student in a town of about 2,000 people whose high school was colloquially referred to as a “dropout factory,” Im describes his younger self as someone who “didn’t have any purpose in life and definitely wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to do with my future.” Then, sort of out of nowhere, at age 16, he developed an intense interest in classical music. He says it was kind of weird, actually, because listening to music of any genre wasn’t part of his childhood or adolescence. But browsing YouTube one day, he ran across a recording of the Second Movement of Bach’s Violin Concerto in D Minor and couldn’t stop listening to it. Things snowballed from there, and he immersed himself in classical music the way other kids his age consumed pop or hip hop. One day, he confided in his school librarian that he was interested in learning to play the violin. As it happened, she was also taking violin lessons, and she offered to give Im her spare instrument if he promised to practice every day.

The librarian also gave him the phone number of the woman she was taking lessons from — Anastasia Solberg — who owned a small music school in town. Im knew he couldn’t afford the lessons, but he called Solberg anyway, and after meeting with her, she offered to give him lessons for free. He took his practice seriously, and after discovering he actually had a talent for it, he started thinking about music as something he could do with his life. He knew, having started lessons so late, he probably couldn’t get into a decent music school. So he enrolled at the nearby community college, where he ended up studying music for three years. Then, in what he calls a “Hail Mary application,” he applied to Bard College, a private liberal arts school in upstate New York, and got in. Im says Bard was a big turning point in his life. His plans going in were to major in music, which he did, though he later switched from violin to voice after discovering a latent talent as an opera singer. But Bard’s educational philosophy was also to foster well-rounded people and interdisciplinary thinking. “At Bard, it was, like, ‘You’re studying music, but what else?’” Im says. For him, that other thing, and second major, turned out to be anthropology. Early on, he remembers taking a class called “Race and Nature in Africa,” which he says was the first time he was introduced to the idea of race as a “concept.” “It was super mind blowing for me, and really put so much of my own life experience in perspective,” Im says. “And this was also a time when Black Lives Matter was gaining steam, so it was also connecting me to politics and so much of what was going on in the world. I had attended community college for three years, but this was the first time I really felt intellectually stimulated — that my brain got moving in that way.”

Im’s experience at Bard was so meaningful that it left him, maybe for the first time in his life, with a fairly clear picture of what he wanted to do. “I loved academia. I love the idea of sitting around and talking about ideas,” Im says. “It seemed like a luxury to think that’s even something you can do.” Still, it sort of remained a dream, and, at first, he didn’t see the path he’d follow to get there — other than knowing it would require a PhD. After graduating from Bard, he made ends meet for a couple years by teaching music lessons and working as a personal care aide for people with traumatic brain injuries. The latter he characterizes succinctly as “very hard work,” something he says he’d never want to do again. But it did open an unfiltered line of sight into the social services system and how inefficient it can be for people. Social work wasn’t something he’d really considered for a career before. But after that experience, he began thinking about it as a real possibility, even if he didn’t see how his background in music and anthropology would get him there. Then, in another twist of good luck, it turned out his undergraduate anthropology mentor at Bard had studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. During a chat with her one day, she tipped him off that the university had a joint social work-anthropology program. It felt fortuitous, and he decided to apply.

In Ann Arbor, Im flourished. He says he’s always seen value in knowing how to do a lot of things, and grad school enabled him to explore a whole new set of interests. In the same way that race emerged as a theme during his undergraduate years, masculinity became the framework for much of his graduate studies — inspired, in part, by the reckoning with male identities that was triggered by the #MeToo movement. During one of his field placements, he worked with men in a program called Alternatives to Domestic Aggression, which was run by a local Catholic social services organization. The heart of the program was a regular group meeting, where men who had committed acts of violence against their domestic partners would, with the help of a facilitator, sort through the messy business of accountability, self-reflection and, in many cases, their own experiences as victims of violence. Im says it was a life-changing experience. He remembers, in particular, being totally floored by the skills of the group facilitator, Jeffrie Cape. “She was incredibly kind and generous, but she also wouldn’t hesitate to lay you flat when you needed it,” Im says. “And you had to be like that. Eighty-five percent of these men were court mandated and they did not want to be there. They would push back and do all kinds of things to obfuscate their responsibility. So she was never just kind or never just super blunt. She was able to see that contradiction and just kind of hold it. That’s what the situation demanded. That was the kind of intimacy you needed to do the work.”

Im says working with the men was a profoundly challenging experience. But it also taught him something important about himself — namely, that he was made of stuff that could weather that kind of emotional intensity and therefore help people. “One of the things I learned is that there are very few spaces in the world where people can be ugly, and therapy is a space for that,” Im says. “But to have spaces for that, you need people who can tolerate that.” As Im began thinking more deeply about his own approach as a therapist, he found himself returning to an important part of his past. The idea that he might combine arts and music with therapy was, he says, motivated in small part by some of the literature he was reading; but mostly because he missed doing music and wanted to figure out some way to bring his passions together. “I mean, music was life changing for me,” he says. “Without it, I don’t know where I would be. So that was sort of on my mind. Prison, violence, men, art — just sort of thinking through all of it.”

Around that time, in another instance of serendipity, he met a woman named Mary Heinen McPherson. Heinen McPherson began serving a life sentence in 1976, and while in prison, became a leading advocate for the rights of incarcerated people. Among the many things she accomplished before she was even released after a sentence commutation in 2002 was co-founding U-M’s Prison Creative Arts Project, which brings various people impacted by the justice system together around the arts. Heinen McPherson was looking for someone to go to a prison and lead a music-based workshop and asked Im if he was interested. He couldn’t say ‘yes’ fast enough. Arts-based workshops in prisons have basically been a major theme of his life, teaching and research ever since. As someone who is an artist himself, you might expect Im to be an unabashed evangelist for the power of the arts to profoundly impact people in prisons. But his own view is that we should be careful about romanticizing the arts. Im says it is absolutely true that the arts have many practical benefits for people in prisons. Often, the value of a workshop is simply breaking up the intense monotony of prison life. Sometimes, the value lies in giving people space to do something human that’s generally not allowed in prison, like laughing or “being able to complain about sh*t.” Sometimes it’s deeper, like when a person experiences poetry as a powerful medium for self-reflection or discovers a latent talent for writing. (Im says you’d be amazed how many guys are naturals at improv theater.) But he says the same vulnerability that the arts inspire can also be “weaponized.” He tells the story of a man who attended one of his poetry workshops and would write “stacks of pages” of poetry every week, often exploring deep topics, like what it’s like to be a gay man living in a prison. Then, one day, during a lockdown event, Im says this man’s cell was searched and the guards discovered his writing. They took turns reading it aloud to each other, laughing, and then tore it up. “So, you know, one of the goals is to give people a chance to exercise parts of their humanity that have been taken away,” Im says. “But their humanity can be turned against them. Vulnerability is not always rewarded in prison. The arts aren’t some kind of magic shield against the violence of prison.”

More recently, Im has become deeply interested in the arts as a communication vehicle between people in prisons and people who live in the free world. Particularly, he’s interested in exploring what power the arts have to help the latter understand the former. After all, unless you have been impacted by the justice system yourself, or have a close loved one who has, you likely have never been to a prison and don’t have any reason or occasion to interact with someone who has been in one. But “art travels,” Im says. Art, writing and poetry can be exhibited and shared outside prison walls, and people who run prisons, surprisingly, often have few objections to doing so. People in prisons can make podcasts. And it all has the potential to help those living in the free world understand — in a nonabstract way — the humanity of people in prisons, and how our lives on the outside depend, in some ways, on us being explicitly or implicitly OK with more than a million Americans living behind bars.

Right now, Im is pondering creative new ways to probe that space, including one project focused on homemade greeting cards, a popular medium that many people in prisons use to communicate with people on the outside. (Im says making greeting cards is also one of the few “honest ways to make a living” in prison.) And he’s also working on a pilot program that would provide free therapeutic services for formerly incarcerated people in Michigan, which he’s hoping can launch this fall. That’s on top of his heavy teaching duties, which new assistant professors are, of course, expected to shoulder. Thankfully, Im says classroom life has been a pleasure so far, in no small part because he feels an affinity with many of his students. “I think, in general, students at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn are very pragmatic,” Im says. “Part of it is a class difference. Many of them are getting a degree so they can start working, which I’m really sympathetic to, actually. I mean, when I was at community college, it was ‘get me out of here so I can do what I need to do,’ which was to make money.” On the other hand, Im loves that he can also give his students a kind of experience that he had at Bard. He knows his “Death, Dying and Bereavement” course, which he taught last semester, may not be as essential to their life goals as organic chemistry. But there’s no missing seeing their eyes — and perspectives — widen when they discuss, for example, how some cultures see cannibalism as a perfectly normal way of mourning loved ones. “To dive into those cross-cultural perspectives with them, to think generously and relatively — that’s kind of the whole point of college,” Im says. “To engage in this intellectual curiosity kind of for its own sake, not the sake of something else — that still feels like such a luxury to me. And when you have other more practical things in your life you have to worry about, like paying your bills or taking care of a family, you don’t always have space for that. So it’s a real joy to be able to share that kind of experience with them.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

Arts

Faculty and Staff

Faculty Research

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Mon, 01/20/2025 - 15:48

The new Health and Human Services assistant professor talks about his prior experience as a musician and therapist, his life’s serendipitous turning points, and his current research on the impact of the arts on people in prisons.

Assistant Professor of Health and Human Services Vitalis Im started at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn in Fall 2024.

Student researchers share what they learned during SURE 2024

jpow — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 15:55:35 +0000

Student researchers share what they learned during SURE 2024 jpow Thu, 09/19/2024 - 11:55

In just a few short years since its founding in 2018, the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience has grown into a mainstay of the campus’ burgeoning research culture. The program pairs faculty mentors and undergraduate students for an 8-12 week summer session in which the student researchers get to do hands-on research, attend professional development sessions and get paid a $3,200 stipend. SURE continued its steady growth this year, providing opportunities for 49 students (up from 32 in 2023), who worked in areas ranging from artificial intelligence and renewable energy to reproductive rights and healthcare. So what are students taking away from this year’s experience? Recently, we talked with two SURE researchers from the College of Engineering and Computer Science and College of Education, Health and Human Services about what they learned this summer. Next week, we’ll have student stories from the College of Business and College of Arts, Sciences and Letters.

Rayan Khalil and Assistant Professor Van Hai Bui
Project: Assessment of solar energy generation towards net-zero energy buildings

Software engineering senior Rayan Khalil says she was drawn to the SURE program mostly because the idea of doing research “just sounded like a really fulfilling experience.” It didn’t disappoint. This summer, Khalil and her faculty mentor, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Van Hai Bui, ticked through a big list of projects focusing on solar energy generation for net-zero buildings. Specifically, Khalil built detailed models that predict how much solar-based electricity a building might expect to produce, given geographically specific variables like wind speed, temperature, day length, cloud cover and the amount of sunlight a site receives in a typical year. Based on those prediction models, she then created an optimization model for net-zero buildings to determine the lowest-cost solar and battery storage installations, while minimizing the amount of purchased power buildings would have to draw from the grid. She even built a user-friendly interface that enables building operators to quickly plug in site-specific variables and get accurate prediction and optimization scenarios.

Rayan Khalil (right) and Assistant Professor Van Hai Bui

Khalil says the summer felt like a super- accelerated learning experience: “In some ways, I feel like I learned as much as I did in two years in two months,” she says. She chalks that up to a couple of factors. First, she’s always had a “passion for sustainability,” and getting to apply her coding skills to something she was really interested in made the whole thing feel “a lot more fulfilling.” Second, unlike in a lot of her courses, there wasn’t a test waiting for her at the end. “Research isn’t one of those things where the answer is already predetermined, so one of the things I loved is that if I tried something and it didn’t work out, I felt like I could learn from that and try something else without worrying that I was going to be graded harshly if I didn’t do it a certain way,” she says. Indeed, Bui won’t be grading Khalil. But he says she accomplished a phenomenal amount of work over the summer, and the prediction models she worked on could be useful in upcoming projects he has planned with DTE. The two are also planning to present their findings at an upcoming conference, for which Khalil is writing the paper. “To maybe have a publication with my name on it — that’s just insane,” she says. It might not be the last either. Heading into her senior year, she says the goal was to finally be done with school and score a full-time job. Now, based on her SURE experience, she’s thinking seriously about grad school.

Sarah Chaban and Associate Professor Lisa Martin
Project: Reproductive freedom on the ballot: How gender and demands for self-determination are driving electoral politics in the post-Roe era

Professor of Health and Human Services Lisa Martin’s first piece of advice for her SURE research partner Sarah Chaban: Set up a new email account. That’s because over the course of the summer, Chaban would be tracking trends in how people are talking about reproductive rights during the election season, a conversation which, needless to say, inspires an intensity that you don't necessarily want flooding your personal email accounts. For her project, Chaban kept tabs on numerous sources, including social media accounts, advertisements, podcasts, state ballot referendums, newsletters and news articles, with a particular focus on language trends. A few of her takeaways thus far? At the highest level, she says voices on the left and right are speaking very different languages, with the latter emphasizing fetal personhood and the former framing things in terms of rights and healthcare. Moreover, especially in the realm of laws and ballot initiatives, there tends to be more uniformity on the right, which Martin and Chaban say reflects a strategy of replicating approaches which have worked well in other states. On the other side, ballot language tends to vary widely both in breadth and emphasis, with states emphasizing (one or multiple) rights and/or healthcare, depending on what organizers think will speak to their constituencies. Overall, Chaban says one of her biggest findings is that the conversation around reproductive rights now has multiple volatile fault lines. Within the post-Roe legal framework, access to contraception and fertility treatments, like IVF, are now being debated sometimes as intensely as abortion.

Sarah Chaban (left) and Professor Lisa Martin

Chaban says one of the biggest lessons she’s drawing from her research experience is how important critical thinking skills are — especially when responding to unexpected challenges. For example, during her project, President Joe Biden, a candidate who rarely uses the word abortion, withdrew from the presidential race, and Vice President Kamala Harris, who uses very different language when speaking about reproductive rights, became the Democratic nominee. “I thought, how am I supposed to put together my poster now that the world has just changed?” Chaban says, smiling. “But this just showed me that when you’re tracking something in real time, you can’t get stuck in your ways of thinking about things. Whatever changes might come, you have to pivot. No knowledge is lost.” Her experience this summer also changed the way she’s thinking about her future. Chaban was originally planning on pursuing a master’s in public health after graduation. But after seeing how many influential voices in the reproductive rights space have legal backgrounds, she’s thinking about law school. And if she can’t choose between the two, she has her eye on the dual degree in Law and Public Health (JD+MPH) at the University of Michigan.

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Want to read more about what students are taking away from SURE 2024? Next week, we’ll feature students from the College of Business and College of Arts, Sciences and Letters. Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Research

Student Success

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Off

Wed, 09/18/2024 - 15:55

The Summer Undergraduate Research Experience had another record year, serving 49 students in 2024. We check in with students and their faculty mentors in each of the colleges, starting with CECS and CEHHS.

CEHHS student Sofia Martínez Barredo presents her research findings during the 2024 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience showcase on Sept. 17.

Class of Fall 2023: CEHHS graduate Briana Hurt

lblouin — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 14:08:34 +0000

Class of Fall 2023: CEHHS graduate Briana Hurt lblouin Wed, 12/06/2023 - 09:08

Whether it's checking off the last few upper-level classes in a major or completing an internship, senior years are typically more about finishing what you started than discovering new interests. For December graduate Briana Hurt, though, her final undergraduate year at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn has featured a little of both. As planned and on time, she'll be finishing her Health and Human Services degree, leaving her a clear path to a job or a spot in grad school in social work or public health — if that’s still what she wants to do. But as she heads toward the commencement stage, there's been a steady internal debate about the path ahead, mostly as a result of new passions she's discovered in the past year.

Hurt says the initial spark came during a class project in a Health and Human Services course taught by Assistant Professor Finn Bell. The students were charged with conducting a community needs assessment, and Hurt chose to focus on her own and other east side Detroit neighborhoods. Dozens of conversations with friends, relatives and neighbors revealed persistent challenges around food access. It was an eye opening experience, one that led Hurt not only to do a deep dive into the complex relationship between food and health but food and politics. “You get out into the neighborhoods and it’s not hard to see the unequal distribution of resources,” Hurt says. “Some neighborhoods have a Whole Foods Market, and in other neighborhoods, residents have to walk close to a mile to the grocery store, which may or may not have quality produce.” Hurt learned about how this phenomenon of “food deserts” — or what some academics and activists call a system of “food apartheid” — leads to systemic health disparities and long-lasting impacts on residents' and neighborhoods’ socioeconomic well-being. The following summer, Hurt traveled deeper down the food politics rabbit hole with Bell, working as a research assistant in the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. Her work focused on collecting oral histories from BIPOC farmers and gardeners in the Ypsilanti area.

During her senior year, Hurt discovered a passion for agriculture. She interned with Keep Growing Detroit, a nonprofit that operates several urban farms in the city and runs a variety of educational programs. (Photo courtesy Briana Hurt)

In a matter of months, Hurt says she was transformed from a person who’d never grown anything but house plants to someone who cared deeply about agriculture and its potential to improve communities. And the very next term, her final at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn, she set herself up for another transformative experience. Hurt enrolled in Semester in Detroit, a program run by 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor that’s open to students on all three campuses, which allows students to live, learn and work in the city alongside community leaders doing grassroots work. It may seem like a strange choice for a Detroit native who’d lived her entire life in the city. But Hurt says it didn’t take long to discover how much she didn’t know about Detroit — and just how inspiring and complex it could be. She learned about the rich history of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, a vibrant, predominantly Black residential and commercial district that was razed for a mid-century interstate. She learned about Detroit’s significant role in the Underground Railroad, and also the deep racial and socioeconomic divides that fueled the 1967 uprising in the city. She was especially inspired by the life of Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American writer and activist who moved to Detroit in the 1950s and became, along with her husband and fellow activist James Boggs, an intellectual force in multiple social justice movements.

“I think the biggest shocker, outside of learning all this history, is why it took so long for me to learn it,” Hurt says. “I’ve lived here my whole life, went to school here, but it took until my senior year of college to discover any of this.” Hurt’s still mulling over why that might be. She thinks part of it has to do with people’s tendencies to want simple narratives — to define Detroit as “The Motor City,” or more recently, as a “revitalization” story. “But the real story is so much deeper and I’ve personally developed a lot of inspiration and appreciation from learning that history,” she says. “I think I was one of those people who would say that they were ‘proud’ to be from Detroit but maybe didn’t know what that meant as much as I do now. Now, I feel like I can articulate why. I have the reasons, and I can share that knowledge with others so maybe they can see the city the way I do.”

Most recently, Hurt got an opportunity to knit together her bolstered love for her hometown with her new interest in agriculture. As part of the Semester in Detroit program, Hurt is doing an internship with Keep Growing Detroit, a nonprofit that operates several urban farms and educational programs to support the organization’s goal of making Detroit a “food sovereign” city. Her work has focused on coordinating volunteers and essential farm chores like harvesting and weeding. Through that experience, she’s discovered the incomparable taste of a fresh-picked heirloom tomato, the joy of “getting lost” in a cucamelon bush and her intense phobia of bugs.

Read about 51��Ƶ-Dearborn student Tepfirah Rushdan, former co-director of Keep Growing Detroit and the City of Detroit’s first director of urban agriculture.

So what’s next for Hurt? That’s the question of the moment. Ever since she chose her Health and Human Services major at the end of her first year, she says the plan was to relocate after graduation, preferably somewhere without cold winters, and get a job in the public health or social work field. That’s still on the table, as is grad school in either discipline. But now she’s also seriously considering sticking closer to home, maybe even Detroit, and pursuing something related to agriculture. She has her eye on the organic agriculture program at Michigan State University, and would love to continue working with the farmers, historians and community organizations that have taken her under their wing this past year.

"In the past year, I’ve just been embraced by people and the community in a way that’s totally surprised me and it’s changed the way I think about things,” she says. "Recently, I kind of shared some of the inner conflict I’ve been feeling with Julia Putnam, the principal at the (James and) Grace Lee Boggs school, and she shared this idea from the poet Antonio Machado that ‘you make the path by walking it.’ That really stuck with me. Everything in your life can’t be preplanned. So that’s what I’m trying to focus on now: Taking my steps, following what I’m passionate about and being open to whatever happens next.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Off

Wed, 12/06/2023 - 14:08

A few pleasant senior year surprises have ignited the December graduate’s interest in urban agriculture, Detroit history and social justice. Could a last-minute career pivot be on the horizon?

Graphic by Violet Dashi

Building a ‘culture of health’ for all Dearborn residents

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 17:23:21 +0000

Building a ‘culture of health’ for all Dearborn residents Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/14/2022 - 12:23

Healthy Dearborn—a community coalition anchored by Beaumont Health, the City of Dearborn and Dearborn Public Schools—may only be a few years old. But its 500-plus members already have racked up an impressive list of victories—including a new bike share project, multiple community fitness programs, improvements to the local farmers market and a robust research team that’s providing data-driven insight into the health needs of Dearborn residents.

The goal is to build a holistic “culture of the health” in the city by improving access to healthy foods and supporting active lifestyles. But as Healthy Dearborn forges ahead, steering committee member and 51��Ƶ-Dearborn Sociology Professor Carmel Price said there’s a renewed emphasis on ensuring the coalition’s work is addressing health priorities for all—and not just some—of Dearborn’s residents.

“The challenge we recognized is that the people who are shaping the conversations are often those who already have more resources,” Price said. “But what about the parts of the city where there are higher rates of chronic conditions? Do they have representation in the Healthy Dearborn coalition? Are they included in the conversations that shape policy and programs? We didn’t want all this great work we’re doing to reinforce the inequities that exist.”

While health disparities have always been part of the Healthy Dearborn mission, Price said it’s become a higher priority since the release of new health data from the Centers for Disease Control. The CDC’s 500 Cities project, detailing chronic disease risk factors and health outcomes in America’s 500 largest cities, painted a picture of a heterogeneous community, where some neighborhoods had far different health outcomes than others. Among the major storylines revealed in the data: Residents in east and south side neighborhoods, which border some of the heaviest industry in metro Detroit, had higher rates of asthma and COPD than their west side neighbors.

New health data from the Centers for Disease Control shows residents in east and south side neighborhoods had higher rates of asthma and COPD than their west side neighbors.

“When we typically think about healthy living, we think about exercising more or eating better,” Price said. “But when we held some community forums on the south side, the resounding message from residents was that their biggest need was air quality—and the fact they didn’t feel comfortable being active outside because of air quality. So it was a much different set of challenges that require a different kind of work than the coalition had done so far.”

Price’s good friend and 51��Ƶ-Dearborn colleague Natalie Sampson has been crucial in that work on the south side of the city. The assistant professor of public health and veteran of air quality campaigns in neighboring Detroit also has enlisted students in one of her public health courses to help facilitate community forums. Sampson said some students, like Karima Alwisha, a south Dearborn resident and public health major, have emerged as strong community leaders.

That work has inspired what Sampson calls “a separate but closely related” new initiative called Environmental Health Research to Action (EHRA). Through EHRA, Sampson, her students, Price, and key community leaders and partners are undertaking several new projects around air pollution, including building an air quality report for the city and launching a summer youth academy.

“The idea is to not just get youth to understand air quality issues—they live there, they know all about that,” Sampson said. “But we can help train them in the science, the epidemiology, how to do air monitoring—and how you can then take that and create a policy advocacy strategy.”

This semester, students in Sampson’s Community Organizing for Health course also worked on so-called “shared use policies.”

“Given that there’s interest in physical activity, but people can’t always be active outside, Healthy Dearborn is trying to make sure people have access to indoor public spaces, like high school gyms, after hours, for exercise,” Sampson said. “So students are researching existing resources and policies and what other communities have done to see if this makes sense for Dearborn.”

Sampson and Price said creative solutions like these are indicative of the contributions the 51��Ƶ-Dearborn community is making in the push to make the city a healthier place. In all, more than 50 faculty, staff and students have lent their effort and expertise to various Healthy Dearborn coalition projects.

“Our students are a critical piece of getting this work done,” Price said. “The coalition members are developing strategic plans and action plans, but when it comes to implementation, we’ve really relied on students to make these ideas a reality. And our researchers—here and at Wayne State and elsewhere—are writing grants, doing data collection, and providing all kinds of expertise. So it’s incredibly exciting to see us building momentum.”

Experiential Learning

College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters

Behavioral Sciences

College of Education, Health, and Human Services

Health and Human Services

Metropolitan Impact

Off

Mon, 04/23/2018 - 05:00

51��Ƶ-Dearborn faculty, staff and students are helping the Healthy Dearborn coalition take on its biggest challenge yet: tackling the city’s health disparities.

Children play in the shadow of heavy industry in a south Dearborn neighborhood. Photo courtesy of Healthy Dearborn.

This 4+1 program is giving students better options for careers in social work

lblouin — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:55:59 +0000

This 4+1 program is giving students better options for careers in social work lblouin Wed, 12/07/2022 - 11:55

51��Ƶ-Dearborn Health and Human Services senior Riley Day hadn't really considered a career in social work until she took her first couple classes in the subject and got hooked. After that, her previous goal of being a child life specialist, a very focused branch of pediatric health care, seemed a bit too narrow compared with all the options she’d have as a social worker. Day particularly loved the holistic approach that the field takes to supporting people, which is something she’d experienced firsthand at the family service agency she volunteered with while in high school. “I worked in the childcare center, and you’d be spending time with the kids when the parents were doing a parenting class or someone was helping them find some economic opportunities,” Day says. “The more I learned, the more I saw how everything in a person’s life is interconnected, and it’s not just one thing that can bring someone’s life back into balance. So how could I work in just one area?”

There was just one snag with Day switching gears. While 51��Ƶ-Dearborn has three versatile Health and Human Services (HHS) major concentrations, and some great courses in social work, the university doesn't formally offer a Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) — the degree many students pursue when they’re looking to get into the field. However, shortly after Day started at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn in 2019, the university started offering a degree program with arguably more perks than a BSW. Through a partnership with the Ann Arbor campus, which has a top-ranked social work program, 51��Ƶ-Dearborn HHS undergrads could earn a U-M Master of Social Work degree (MSW) with just one additional year of study.

Here’s how the Human Services and Social Work 4+1 program works: During their first three academic years at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn, Health and Human Services students interested in social work complete their required courses for the Bachelor of Science in HHS with a Human Services concentration. Then, by March 1 of their junior year, they can apply for admission to the 4+1. If accepted, 51��Ƶ-Dearborn seniors take four graduate courses that count toward both the completion of their undergraduate HHS degree at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn and their U-M School of Social Work MSW. Then, after completing their bachelor's, students fully matriculate into the MSW program and can finish in as little as three additional semesters.

For Day, the 4+1 was a great fit. Now in the first semester of the program, she says her experience has been really positive. One of the things she appreciates — and which has also been a bit of an adjustment — is taking classes with older students who have more robust social work experiences, including many who have been working as social workers for years. “Some of my classmates have traveled abroad to work, they are married with kids, they moved here from other states to study, and I was feeling a little like, ‘I’m very much at the beginning of my career, my bachelor’s has not solely been in social work, and I’m still very much learning,’” Day says. “I think part of me was wondering if I was too young to be here, and that maybe I needed to get some more experience and then come back. But the flip side of that is it’s pretty amazing to have classmates with different backgrounds and so much experience, because they can speak to how things are in the places they’re coming from. I honestly feel like I’m getting so much more out of my classes because of that.”

U-M Associate Professor Katie Richards-Schuster, who’s been involved with the planning of the program since the beginning, says making sure the 4+1 students feel like they belong is something the program administrators always have their eye on. For example, while they don’t call out a student’s 4+1 status to the whole class, they do let faculty know when they have undergraduates in one of their courses. “We want our faculty to be prepared that students may have a lot of questions, so they may want to check in to make sure they feel confident or have what they need,” Richards-Schuster says. “Knowing that students might need a little extra nudge to participate, a faculty member may also want to find ways for them to speak up in class; for example, starting with pairs, then small groups, so it’s not always just one big class discussion.”

That’s a strategy Lecturer Grace Helms-Kotre has used effectively in her MSW courses, where she frequently asks students to write personal reflections on class topics. That provides students a chance to test drive and get feedback on their ideas in a more private setting, while giving her a window into how they’re doing both personally and academically. Day, who has Helms-Kotre this semester, says she’s really valued having that platform, and it’s helped reassure her that she deserves to be there. Regarding performance, the results have been definitive thus far: Richards-Schuster says faculty consistently report that 4+1 students, which include Dearborn HHS students and sociology undergrads from the Ann Arbor campus, are doing some of the best written and theoretical work.

Only a handful of students from Dearborn have enrolled in the program so far, but applications are showing signs of picking up in 2023. In many ways, Richards-Schuster thinks a slow start is probably a good thing, because there are always administrative and scheduling bugs to work out when you’re coordinating systems between two campuses. Based on the feedback of some of the early enrollees, they’ve also built out a more comprehensive set of programs to strengthen the cohort experience and guide students on admissions, financial aid and different tracks within the MSW program.

Day doesn’t mind being an early adopter/guinea pig. For her, the timing of the program launch was fortuitous, and she says she’s received a ton of support from advisers on both the Dearborn and Ann Arbor sides. She’s also starting to get more questions about the 4+1 from students coming up behind her, which bodes well for the future of the program. “I actually had a classmate ask me about it when I was applying, because she was kind of in the same boat I was in,” Day says. “She wanted to do social work with geriatric populations, but we didn’t have the BSW. Obviously, this gives you the option to get a social work degree, but being able to reduce the time and money it takes to get a graduate degree is huge. So I’m happy to answer any questions and be an ambassador, because I definitely think it’s a great option for a lot of students.”

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Are you interested in learning more about the 4+1 MSW program? Get more information and learn how to apply. Story by Lou Blouin

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Launched two years ago, the program allows 51��Ƶ-Dearborn undergraduates to get a Master of Social Work from Ann Arbor with just one extra year of study. So how is the program going so far?

Health and Human Services student Riley Day is taking advantage of a unique program that is allowing her to get a head start on her 51��Ƶ-Ann Arbor Master of Social Work degree while still a senior at 51��Ƶ-Dearborn. Photo courtesy Riley Day

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