In July 2015, the Minority Health Disparities Initiative launched out community Impact (MHDI CI) mission: Developing long-term sustainable collaborations with communities that strengthen efforts to produce measurable impact on the health disparities affecting people across Nebraska and the Great Plains. Our first step was to engage a wide rage of community stakeholders and asked them how we could best serve them in their efforts to create healthy, growing, and diverse communities. Together we have developed innovative CI projects that address the community identified gaps. One strategy is working directly with communities to develop collaborative research teams. Together we build new innovative CI projects that address these identified gaps.
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HealthVoiceVision is a combined Photovoice (PV) and survey research project that links community voices/images with rigorous social science research methods to provide more insight into the health of rural communities. The project is funded by the Rural Futures Institute and addresses an important gap in our understanding of local health ways by providing data at sub-county, community specific levels. The creation of a cost-effective and accurate means for uncovering health inequalities in rapidly changing, ethnically diverse small communities in the Midwest will help lead the way to more accurate health interventions within these communities.
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More information about Health Voice Vision can be found here.
Funded in part by the Rural Futures Insitute, YouRHealth is a program that was piloted in Lexington, Nebraska and is designed to engage and teach high school freshman to research, create, implement, and evaluate a wide variety public health campaigns. The student-created campaigns were delivered to family/friends at an end of the semester community health fair. YouRhealth students are the next generation of public health educators, researchers, and NU health discipline students.
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More information about YouRHealth can be found here.
