Connect: Cultivating Academic-Community Partnerships to Address Our Communities' Complex Needs During Public Health Crises.

BACKGROUND: Black and Latino communities have been disproportionately impacted by coronavirus disease 2019 and we sought to understand perceptions and attitudes in four heavily impacted New Jersey counties to develop and evaluate engagement strategies to enhance access to testing. OBJECTIVE: To establish a successful academic/community partnership team during a public health emergency by building upon longstanding relationships and using principles from community engaged research. METHODS: We present a case study illustrating multiple levels of engagement, showing how we successfully aligned expectations, developed a commitment of cooperation, and implemented a research study, with community-based and health care organizations at the center of community engagement and recruitment. LESSONS LEARNED: This paper describes successful approaches to relationship building including information sharing and feedback to foster reciprocity, diverse dissemination strategies to enhance engagement, and intergenerational interaction to ensure sustainability. CONCLUSIONS: This model demonstrates how academic/community partnerships can work together during public health emergencies to develop sustainable relationships.

Community- Versus Health Care Organization-Based Approaches to Expanding At-Home COVID-19 Testing in Black and Latino Communities, New Jersey, 2021.

At-home COVID-19 testing offers convenience and safety advantages. We evaluated at-home testing in Black and Latino communities through an intervention comparing community-based organization (CBO) and health care organization (HCO) outreach. From May through December 2021, 1100 participants were recruited, 94% through CBOs. The odds of COVID-19 test requests and completions were significantly higher in the HCO arm. The results showed disparities in test requests and completions related to age, race, language, insurance, comorbidities, and pandemic-related challenges. Despite the popularity of at-home testing, barriers exist in underresourced communities. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(S9):S918-S922. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306989).

Interdisciplinary Approach to Building Functionality for Weather Hazards.

It is estimated that in the United States, people spend 90% of their time in buildings. In order to ensure quality of life for communities, we propose a human-centric design approach to building "functionality." "Functionality" is defined as the set of "essential services" to meet occupant needs for safety and well-being. These services include lighting, heating and cooling, ventilation, water supply, and wastewater management. At present, a multidisciplinary top-down approach exists where owners dictate the building operations to architects. Our central thesis is that a bottom-up approach based on occupant safety and well-being should drive the functionality design process. Research on occupant well-being conducted by social scientists should be considered by architects in creating the building functionality layout. One of the results of this research should be a set of the type and level of services required for well-being. Architects and engineers should work together to design physical systems to ensure that the derived acceptable levels of the services not be exceeded for various frequencies of occurrence tied to the weather conditions at the site. In order to make this approach viable, minimal amounts of continuous electric power must be made available such as through building integrated photovoltaic panels. The corresponding onsite power generation and storage needs are therefore a critical aspect of the proposed formulation. It is anticipated that significant interactions during the iterative building design process among the architects and social scientists with the engineering disciplines will change an existing multidisciplinary approach into an interdisciplinary one.

The impact of using a veterinary medicine activity book in the classroom on fifth- and sixth-grade students' depictions of veterinarians.

Efforts to develop a diverse, future veterinary workforce must start as early as elementary school, when children begin to form perceptions about careers. The objective of the current project was to determine the impact of the Veterinary Medicine Activity Book: Grade 5 on fifth- and sixth-grade students' depictions of veterinarians. The book was delivered as part of the curriculum in four classrooms. Students were asked to draw a veterinarian and describe the veterinarian's activities before and after being exposed to the book. Drawings were evaluated for the gender and race/ethnicity of the illustrated veterinarian, the description of the veterinarian's activity, and animals portrayed. Significant differences were detected within three of four classrooms. In one class, after exposure to the activity book, more students drew male veterinarians and veterinarians performing an activity specifically mentioned in the book. In a second class, more students drew large animals after exposure to the activity book. In a third class, after exposure to the activity book, more students drew large animals and veterinarians performing an activity specifically mentioned in the book. Results provide preliminary evidence that children's depictions of veterinarians can be altered through use of educational materials delivered in classrooms through teacher-led discussion or formal lesson plans.