Past Programs

Collateral Damage During the COVID Pandemic: Behavioral Health Impact on Youth, Families, and Community Care

Monday, May 9, 2022
12:30 – 1:30 PM

At the beginning of the COVID shutdown in March 2020 (remote work and school), there was a decrease in people seeking behavioral help in Emergency Departments. Then in June 2020, a surge of behavioral health presentations to Emergency Departments was noted to be 3-4 times the usual number for all age groups with notably long boarding episodes for children and adolescents. This surge in behavioral health need has continued at a higher demand throughout 2021 creating a crisis of care in Emergency Departments. This talk will focus on Massachusetts’ State response to this increased need for acute behavioral healthcare since June 2020 and how this crisis is shaping the State’s response to community access to behavioral healthcare into the future.

Working With Policymakers

Thursday, March 24, 2022
11 AM – 1 PM

Presenters:
• Lisa M. Troy, PhD
• Laurel Smith-Doerr, PhD
from the
• UMass Amherst Public Engagement Project

What do policymakers most want to know, and what are the best ways to approach and communicate with them? Policymakers include both elected officials who make laws and employees in public sector organizations who implement them. This workshop will explain all the reasons why policymakers want input from academic researchers and help you envision the roles you wish to play in relation to policy and advocacy. The workshop will also highlight differences in the culture and goals of policymakers and academics, so that you can learn the best ways to get your points across in the policy world.

Presenters, from the Public Engagement Project at UMass/Amherst:

Lisa M. Troy, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences and The Commonwealth Honors College Professor in Nutrition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Troy uses novel pattern analysis approaches to examine the role of diet and exercise on chronic disease prevention. She also studies how government programs and policies impact public health outcomes. She has extensive experience in public policy engagement including as a study director for the National Academies of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, and has given invited lectures at professional conferences on “Tips for talking to policy-makers,” and “Using Qualitative Data to Inform Social Policy.” In 2010-12, Dr. Troy worked in the U.S. Senate (Robert P. Casey, PA) and U.S. House of Representatives (James P. McGovern, MA) through Columbia University’s Health and Aging Policy Fellowship and American Political Science Association programs.

Laurel Smith-Doerr, Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She studies organizational contexts for equity in science and technology, and processes in collaborative knowledge production. She is PI of the $3.1M NSF ADVANCE-Institutional Transformation grant at UMass Amherst, which seeks change toward faculty equity. From 2007-2009 she was Program Director in Science, Technology and Society at the National Science Foundation. For work at NSF leading the Ethics Education in Science and Engineering program and serving on the committee implementing ethics education policies of Congress’ America COMPETES Act, Smith-Doerr received the NSF Director’s Award for Collaborative Integration. Her recent article with coauthors in the American Journal of Sociology provides a new organizational level theory of the gender pay gap, and won the 2020 Devah Pager award for best article from the Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility section of ASA. All combined, her published works have been cited over 18,000 times.

Click here for slides

Building Community-Academic Research Partnerships

January 13 and 20, 2022

Presenters:
Bettye Anderson Frederic, RN, MSN
Kathleen Szegda, PhD, MS, MPH
Sarah Goff, MD, PhD

Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Massachusetts Medical School - Baystate

This workshop offered attendees pragmatic approaches to building and sustaining mutually beneficial community-academic research partnerships that apply health equity and anti-racism lenses to the shared work.

Sample materials:
Health Equity Checklist
Sample Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)