From Rhetoric to Reality:
Achieving Authentic, Equitable & Transformative Partnerships
13th International Conference - April 30 - May 3, 2014
Chicago, Illinois USA

OVERVIEW
Introduction Why Chicago? Meet our Conference Partners Important Dates	Meet the Conference Planning Committee Download the Conference Flyer

Introduction

Why Chicago?

Chicago is an exceptional city with many examples of thriving, effective community and academic partnerships that are focused on a wide range of health equity and social justice issues. The Chicago Consortium for Community Engagement and Chicago Community Based Participatory Research Network further demonstrate the significant level of leadership and involvement. In addition to those two groups, over 100 local community and academic partners are working to make our 13th conference a success. Successful community and academic partnerships aren't the only thing Chicago has to offer: come for the conference and stay for the world-class museums, lake views, cutting-edge architecture and endless delicious dining options!

Meet our Conference Partners!

Core Partners

Northwestern Medicine

Northwestern Medicine® is the collaboration between Northwestern Memorial HealthCare and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine around a strategic vision to transform the future of healthcare. Together we aspire to be the destinations of choice for people seeking quality healthcare and for those who provide, support and advance that care through leading-edge treatments and breakthrough discoveries. Our shared commitment to transform healthcare and to be among the nation's top academic medical centers will be accomplished through innovation and excellence. The organizations within Northwestern Medicine comprise more than 9,000 clinical and administrative staff, 3,100 medical and science faculty and 700 students.

The University of Chicago Medicine

The University of Chicago Medicine has been at the forefront of medical care since 1927, when it opened its doors to its first patients. The University of Chicago Medicine and its Comer Children’s Hospital rank among the best in the country, most notably for cancer treatment, according to U.S. News & World Report’s survey of the nation’s hospitals. The University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine has been named one of the Top 10 medical schools in the nation, by U.S. News’ "Best Graduate Schools" survey.  Twelve of the Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the University of Chicago Medicine.

DePaul University 

Since its founding in 1898, DePaul University has been a leader in educating students to maintain a life-long commitment to community and civic engagement.  Supporting the health and wellbeing of Chicagoans is a central focus of the institution's Vincentian mission and its current strategic plan.  The university's Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning develops mutually beneficial, reciprocal relationships with over 400 Chicago community organizations in order to develop a sense of social agency in students through enrollment in service-learning courses and participation in paid community internships.  DePaul's College of Science and Health and Master of Public Health Program offer interdisciplinary degrees that emphasize social justice and service to vulnerable populations.

Supporting Partner

University of Illinois at Chicago

The Adler School of Professional Psychology

The Adler School of Professional Psychology has provided quality education through a scholar/practitioner model for 60 years. The School’s mission is to train socially responsible graduates who continue the visionary work of Alfred Adler throughout the world. The Adler School offers graduate-level programs enrolling more than 1,000 students at its campuses in Chicago and Vancouver, British Columbia, and through Adler Online.

Important Dates

Meet the Conference Planning Committee

Cynthia (Cee) Boyd began her health professional career in 1973 as a diploma prepared registered nurse. She completed her BSN, MSN and finally her Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Boyd has held a variety of advance practice and administrative roles including those of Critical Care Clinical Specialist, Assistant Director of Nursing and Executive Director of a community health center network. Currently, Dr. Boyd is the Director of the UIC Great Cities Neighborhoods Initiative/Director Community Health Initiatives for the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her responsibilities include developing, directing and monitoring University/community partnerships. She directs numerous community based initiatives including school based clinics, community based education programs, community based research initiatives, home visiting programs for families with special needs and after-school programs to name a few. Dr. Boyd is the Assistant Dean for Community Initiatives for the UIC College of Nursing. She serves as the director, principal investigator or evaluation director for several federally supported programs including REACH 2010, supported by the Centers for Disease Control, the Chicago Partnership for Health Promotion, supported by the United States Department of Agriculture, the Multiethnic Research Core, supported by the National Institute for Health and Healthy Schools/Healthy Communities, supported by the Bureau of Primary Health Care.

Jen Brown, MPH, is Director of the Alliance for Research in Chicagoland Communities (ARCC), the community-based participatory research (CBPR) program working with the Northwestern University Institute for Public Health and Medicine (IPHAM) and the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences (NUCATS) Institute. The ARCC mission is growing equitable and collaborative partnerships between Chicago area communities and Northwestern University for research that leads to measureable improvement in community health. Jen has extensive experience and training in community health and community-academic partnerships, with an emphasis on program development and management, training design and delivery, institutional change efforts, network building and facilitation, and multi-institutional collaborations. Previously she worked with the University of Illinois-Chicago Neighborhoods Initiative. Prior to her move back to the Midwest, Jen was the Program Director for Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, where she was responsible for managing the organization's CBPR-related projects and programs. Jen currently serves on the Executive Committees of the Chicago Consortium for Community Engagement (C3), the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children, and Board of Directors for the Chicago Women’s Health Center, and the Young Leaders Fund of The Chicago Community Trust.

Troy Bush is the Research Manager for the Center for Community-Based Research and Education at St. Luke’s Episcopal Health Charities.  Troy’s role at the Charities includes supporting the Community Research Faculty on projects involving community participatory research.  His research career started in adult psychiatric clinical trials before moving into pediatric emergency medicine trials.  Troy has a passion for preventing suicide and is a founding member of the Houston-area Suicide Prevention Coalition and serves on the Texas Suicide Prevention Council.  Troy is also active in the recovery community and the GLBT community of Houston. Troy holds a Bachelor’s of Science from Stephen F. Austin State University.

Scot Evans is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational and Psychological Studies in the School of Education and Human Development and the Faculty Master at Eaton Residential College. He directs the undergraduate major in Human and Social Development (HSD) and teaches in the master’s program in Community and Social Change. Dr. Evans is a community-engaged scholar researching and promoting the role of community-based human service organizations in the promotion of community wellbeing, social change, and social justice. He received his Ph.D. in Community Research and Action at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He has a master’s degree in Human Development Counseling also from Vanderbilt. Dr. Evans also has extensive practical experience in community-based organizations as a youth development worker, crisis worker, family counselor, youth program developer, program evaluator, and organizational consultant.

James M. Galloway is the President and CEO of Admiral Innovations, a health innovation consulting firm, focused on the future of health and healthcare in the US and globally. He recently retired from his role as Assistant Surgeon General and HHS Regional Health Administrator for the upper Midwest. Prior to that, Dr. Galloway was assigned to the University of Arizona as an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine in the College of Medicine as well as an Associate Professor of Public Health in the College of Public Health and founded the Center for Native American Health and the clinical Native American Cardiology Program. He is currently an adjunct Professor at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Cardiology and Preventive Medicine and is completing the Executive Leadership Masters Degree in Health Care Management Program at Harvard. Dr. Galloway is also a co-founder and lead in the large collaborative entitled Building a Healthier Chicago, with the Institute of Medicine of Chicago, HHS, the Chicago Medical Society and the City of Chicago.

Linda Hawkins is the co-founder of the Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship and the Research Shop at the University of Guelph, which seeks to build capacity and engagement among community, faculty and students. She has extensive experience designing and facilitating community-university partnerships around community research needs, and serves as the lead knowledge broker for the College of Social & Applied Human Sciences. She was previously executive director of the interdisciplinary research intensive Centre for Families, Work and Well-being, a highly successful centre attracting large and small partnership projects including 2 community-university research alliances focusing on issues around gender work and care (father involvement and rural women's livelihoods). Linda serves as part of the national leadership team for a collaboration of 8 Canadian universities and CCPH focusing on community engaged scholarship and faculty rewards and development.

Melvin Jackson, MSPH, has over 30 years of experience in public health research and program coordination. For the past 10 years he has served as Program Manager/Program Director for Project DIRECT, the largest community based demonstration project in the nation addressing the health disparity of diabetes. He currently directs the Community Health Ambassador’s Program and the ADA Recognized Diabetes Self-Management Training Program under the umbrella of the North Carolina Division of Public Health. Mr. Jackson also serves on the Advisory Committee for the NC ADA Recognition Program and has participated on a number of advisory committees including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention’s Men As Navigators (MAN) For Health, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project addressing health disparities among African American and Latino men in Wake, Orange and Chatham Counties in North Carolina. Melvin is currently Co-Principal Investigator of Focus on Youth + ImPACT:  A Pilot Project to Test and HIV/AIDS Curriculum in Faith-Based Settings funded by the Carolina Comprehensive NIMHD Center (Project EXPORT).  Melvin Jackson also serves as a member of the NC Division of Public Health Institutional Review Board. Mr. Jackson has extensive experience training community and academic partners in CBPR and building the capacity of community-based organizations. He serves on the Wake AHEC Regional TraCS Campus Community Advisory Board, providing community perspective to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s NC TraCS (Translational Research and Clinical Sciences) Institute, home of UNC’s CTSA award. Mr. Jackson serves as Community Expert Consultant with the CTSA Supplement: Community Leadership and Reciprocal Development to Advance Community Engaged Research at Two CTSA Institutions and its subsequent project, Community Engagement Consulting Models: Taking Them to Scale. Outside of his professional experiences, Mr. Jackson serves as the President of the Board for Another Choice for Black Children, Inc. a nonprofit adoption agency in NC.

Susan Kunz, MPH, has provided public health leadership in Arizona’s U.S.-México border region for 30 years. Susan is a public health professional specializing in design and implementation of community-based interventions to reduce health disparities in underserved communities. Her work has been in partnership with community-based organizations to create, advance and replicate evidence-based practice that address social determinants of health. In that regard, Susan is an experienced program developer and grant writer, having written and managed grants awarded for as much as $9 million. Susan practices mentorship and capacity building to develop indigenous leaders Susan began her public health career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Colombia, South America. Susan worked for the Tohono O’odham Nation as a health planner and directed the Border Health Foundation serving the U.S-México border. After working as an independent consultant for a decade, Susan joined Mariposa Community Health Center in Nogales as its Chief of Health and Wellness, Platicamos Salud. Susan has served on the Community Action Board (CAB) for the Arizona Prevention Research Center at the University of Arizona for more than ten years and is currently Chair of the National Community Committee (NCC) that advises the CDC Prevention Research Center Program. Susan received the Commitment to Underserved People Award from the Arizona Public Health Association in 2006 and the inaugural Rosemary McKenzie Legacy Award from the National Rural Health Association Multicultural and Multiethnic Council in 2012. Susan received her Master’s in Public Health Degree from the UC Berkeley and is fluently bilingual in English and Spanish.

Linda Sprague Martinez is Assistant Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine at the Tufts University School of Medicine. Dr. Martinez teaches applied courses focused on community-engaged approaches tohealth research and assessment, as well as courses focused on health disparities. Having worked as both a provider and policy maker, Dr. Martinez in interested in how local and organizational policies both directly and indirectly influence the wellbeing of urban communities of color, particularly youth. To that end she is focused on how assets can be recognized and leveraged by communities and organizations to improve living environments. Dr. Sprague Martinez directed Nuestro Futuro Saludable: The JP Partnership for Healthy Caribbean Youth (NFS), and currently co-directs Mitigating Obesity Among Boston’s Immigrant Communities, a community engaged intervention research study that blends physical activity and workforce development, as well as Nuestro Futuro: Engaging Black and Latino Youth in Applied Science Education (NFASE), a community engaged scienceeducation grant designed to engage students in applied inquiry focused on health disparities. She completed her doctoral degree in Social Policy at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in 2009.

Doriane Miller is the inaugural director of the Center for Community Health and Vitality at the University of Chicago Medical Center. The Center’s mission is to improve population health outcomes for residents on the South Side of Chicago through community-engaged research, demonstration and service models. Dr. Miller is a faculty member of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, MA and brings over 20 years of experience as a community-based primary care provider who has worked with under-served, minority populations with a special interest in behavioral health. She served as medical director of the Maxine Hall Health Center of the San Francisco Department of Health, while also serving as Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital, University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Miller received her medical degree from the University of Chicago.  She completed a Primary Care Internal Medicine Residency and a General Medicine/Clinical Epidemiology Fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco.

Wendy Paszkiewicz is the Vice President of Community Engagement and Training and has been with the Adler School since 2004. Dr. Paszkiewicz earned her Bachelor’s of Science in Psychology from Michigan State University and Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology. Dr. Paszkiewicz is a licensed clinical psychologist and her primary area of interest is the integration of socially responsible practice in the education and training of future mental health professionals. Other interest areas include child and adolescent well-being and development, advocacy, leadership, and women’s issues.  She has been in higher education for 15 years and has served in administrative/faculty positions including Director of Clinical Training and Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs prior to her current role.

Penny Rembolt, MS, is the Education Specialist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine Office of Student Affairs and Curriculum. Prior to coming to the Carver College of Medicine 12 years ago, my education and professional experience was in medical social work, community mental health and substance abuse counseling. Currently I am the Ass’t Director of Financial Services in the College and I coordinate most of the service programs for the College, including the student run UI Mobile Clinic and the Service Distinction Track. I am also the Course Coordinator for a service learning elective on health disparities and I facilitate small groups in the pre clinical curriculum. My College role allows me to work very actively with many community agencies to form partnerships and give our medical students opportunities to work with the community.

Cassandra Ritas is the Principal Policy Advisor for The People’s Policy Institute, a national education and action company that works with communities and their partners to design and promote healthy, efficient, and equitable policies.  Cassandra founded PPI in 2009 to help fill the gaps between science and policy, communities and governments.  For the past several years she been developing and piloting policy analysis and advocacy workshops for community-academic partnerships around the United States.   She served for three years (2000-2003) as the Chair of the Policy Work Group of the Harlem Urban Research Center’s Community Action Board (now known as the Harlem Community Academic Partnership).  Cassandra is a graduate of Hunter College of the City University of New York.  She holds a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  Cassandra has a special interest in participatory decision-making, health policy, criminal justice policy, and aging.   In 2002 she received a fellowship from Community-Campus Partnerships for Health to produce a tool-kit for CBPR practitioners seeking policy change.  “Speaking Truth, Creating Power: A guide to policy work for CBPR practitioners,” is available on the CCPH website.

Howard Rosing is the Executive Director of the Irwin W. Steans Center for Community-based Service Learning and Community Service Studies at DePaul University. He is an adjunct professor of Community Service Studies, Anthropology, Geography, and Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Community Psychology. Dr. Rosing is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on urban food access, economic restructuring, community food systems, and food justice movements in Chicago and the Dominican Republic. He is actively engaged in scholarship on service-learning and community-based research as pedagogies and is co-editor of Pedagogies of Praxis: Course-based Action Research in the Social Sciences (Jossey-Bass, 2007). Dr. Rosing holds a Ph.D in anthropology from the State University of New York-Binghamton.

Darius Tandon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  Much of Dr. Tandon's research is conducted using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach.  Currently, he is the principal investigator of two CBPR studies being conducted in employment training programs—the first, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded project examining the effect of a multi-component intervention to provide mental health services and supports to employment training participants and the second, a National Institute of Mental Health funded study examining the efficacy of a community-based depression prevention intervention for employment training participants.  He is also the Principal Investigator of a NIH funded study aimed at improving the mental health of pregnant and recently delivered women enrolled in home visitation programs.  Dr. Tandon is the Editor-in-Chief of the only peer-reviewed journal solely focused on publishing CBPR: Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, & Action.  Dr. Tandon is also the director of the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Clinical and Translational Research’s community engagement core where he is responsible for promoting research and education activities related to community-based translational research.

Jose Antonio Tovar-Aguilar is Chair of the CDC's Prevention Research Center Network's National Community Committee (NCC) representing the Florida Research Prevention Center (FPRC). As a member of the Farmworkers Association of Florida he is the community Project Director of the Partnership for Citrus Worker Health, a Community-Based Prevention Marketing program targeting citrus harvesters in collaboration with the FPRC. Further, he also collaborates on a Community Based Participant Research project between the association and Emory University to evaluate the effects of pesticides on female farmworkers.  Originally from Mexico, he finished his BA in Philosophy with honors at the University of Guanajuato, followed by studies in Community Health and Rural Development at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Chiapas. In the United States he has worked on the study of health disparities and access to health care in the Latino Community of Florida in his studies at the University of Florida, completing his MA in Anthropology and becoming a Ph.D. candidate in the program with concentration in Medical Anthropology. He joins CCPH while Vice-Chair of the NCC and he is also member of the Immokalee Lions Club. He shares his life with a fellow Cultural Anthropologist and two children age 6 and 13.

Roberto Vargas has worked in San Francisco community- and school-based organizations since the 80's, primarily leading programs that strengthen the capacity of activist and struggling youth-of-color. For the past five years, he has worked to build alliances between UCSF and SF's communities and institutional partners to promote health justice and reduce health disparity. His formal training is in Public Health and Sociology with an emphasis in Community Health Equity. His informal training is in Social Justice and Healing Community Trauma. Roberto has been a Bayview resident for 22 years.

Athena Green Williams was born, raised, and continues to reside on Chicago’s Westside, and is an active Westside community advocate.  As an active member throughout the city, Athena has served with the Westside Minister’s Coalition since 2000. Previously as community liaison for Building a Healthier Chicago, Athena developed and implemented the first 5k walk program through an underserved community.  In addition, Athena worked to collaborate and bring many new resources into underserved communities.  At the Westside Minister’s Coalition, Athena served as Community Outreach Specialist, Education Committee Chair, Health Committee Co-Chair, and before her leave as Fund Developer.  In 2010, Athena founded Performing Community Solutions, an organization whose mission is to improve, empower, and educate, community residents with access of healthy living, continued education, with the integration of collaboration of private and public partnerships.  A graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Athena is currently pursuing continued education.