On April 1st, members of our Research & Evaluation team welcomed the youth participants of the Catapult/Global Early Adolescent Study (GEAS) back for a closeout bash! Click to read more about this research study that took place over a few years, highlighting the importance of frequent communication and engagement in the form of in-person events or creative modalities to maintain youth interest.
Read MoreIt’s been a busy year for the COMMS team! Our team division supports all of the other divisions/programs at IWES and our partners. We are excited to share some highlights with you, including our amazing film and media work, a social marketing campaign to promote healthy behavior change, and what has been happening on our social media!
Read MoreThis past year has been one of growth and momentum for Puentes Para Invitados (PPI), which translates to Bridges for Guests, a project funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation focused on both the healing and psychosocial well-being of migrant individuals — or guests — crossing the U.S. Southern border as well as providers serving migrants in New Mexico. Click here to learn more about the growth that has taken place this last year for PPI!
Read MoreThe Black Women First Care & Treatment Services (CATS) NOLA initiative, funded through HRSA’s Special Projects of National Significance (SPNS), made great strides this year to improve care and treatment coordination for Black women living with HIV (BWLH) through local patient services and provider trainings. Learn more about all the that was done through the HRSA project this year!
Read MoreThis past year has been very eventful for the R&E division! We traveled abroad, led trainings on community research ethics and conducting qualitative research, supported schools with universal mental and behavioral health screenings, leveraged program data to inform and improve IWES’ adolescent sexual and reproductive health programming, and maintained research collaborations with numerous local and regional community-serving partners. Click to see our R&E highlights from the past year!
Read More2022 has been a busy year for the Maternal and Child Health (MCH) team at IWES! We were excited to support the the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 105 (HCR 105) that established the Louisiana Perinatal Mental Health Taskforce, and continued working with the taskforce throughout the year. Read our MCH reflections and see the four recommendations we provided to Louisiana policymakers by clicking here.
Read MoreThe Collective for Healthy Communities (CHC) team is excited to share some news about our team has grown this year! Many of our team members have been promoted into new roles within the CHC team and we want to shout them out: Emily Doyle, LMSW, is now our CHC Program Manager and Meagan Dunham, LMSW, is our new Program Manager for CHC’s newest initiative, Multisystem Compassionate Caring and Healing for Black Youth [MCH-BY]. Additionally, we are thrilled to have Lydia Garrett-Metz, who started by interning with us and is now a CHC Program Associate. Visit this blog to learn more about Emily, Meagan, and Lydia and their roles on the CHC team!
Read MoreWe are excited to highlight UNO anthropology student and Hollygrove resident Ka’Sha Fenceroy, who has been selected to serve as an IWES Policy Advisory Fellow! Click to learn more about Ka’Sha and what she will be doing as a Policy Advisory Fellow!
Read MoreOur Louisiana Youth for Health Justice (LYHJ) Council has continued to grow this year, and we were excited to welcome new members for the 2022-2023 school year. Our vibrant group of young people will continue the work to be more involved in shaping policies that influence sexual and reproductive health and advocating for equitable change in social, racial, and reproductive justice for our community – and home state of Louisiana. Read on to see are newest LYHJ Councils members!
Read MoreSt. John the Baptist Parish recently ended their debris pickup from Hurricane Ida, which made landfall in Louisiana on August 29th, 2021, the sixteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. More than a year later, places that were badly damaged by Ida are still cleaning up and in the early stages of a long rebuilding, recovery, and healing process. Now that autumn has settled in and the worst of storm season seems to have passed, it’s important to remember that while some of us are looking ahead to the holidays many people are still displaced by the last hurricane to ravage our state. Our personal health and well-being are intimately linked with the health and well-being of our communities and the collective actions that we take, but thankfully, interdependence can be a strength if we work together!
Read MoreLast year, we shared some insight into how we do community-engaged research (CEnR) here at IWES. Now we would like to share more about our Institutional Review Board (IRB), which is a large component of this work! Read more about our IRB and the important work they do with us at IWES.
Read MoreThis quarter we’re sharing takeaways from the article, “Over half of known human pathogenic diseases can be aggravated by climate change,” which discusses how change to the climate due to the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) is creating more instances and opportunities for deadly, contagious diseases worldwide. We chose this article since the COVID-19 pandemic was a sobering reality check that we cannot continue as we have. Our actions impact the environment, the climate, and each other, and if we continue to go as we have, we will also be harming ourselves. That may feel heavy, but we promise there’s some hope, so take a moment to check out the full article and start thinking about what we can do as a society to move forward.
Read MoreAfter eight hours of travel from New Orleans to Brighton, England, Iman Shervington, our Director of Media and Communications, and Petera Reine Diaban, our Sr. Social Marketing Manager, arrived at the 2022 World Social Marketing Conference (WSMC) this September. Iman and Petera attended the conference to share an innovative concept to strengthen the process of understanding the intended audience of a social marketing campaign. The duo infused the principles of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, into the formative evaluation process of audience segmentation. Find out more about the relationship between archetypes and social marketing by checking out the full article.
Read MoreClimate justice and reproductive justice have become existential battlegrounds that are defining physical, mental, and spiritual health, and collective wellbeing. According to the Seventh Generation Principle of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people, the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. This ancient Principle is often applied to thinking about how to make conscious decisions about the use of natural resources, but I think this wisdom should extend to the ways that we value and care for people and relationships.
Read MoreThis quarter we’re sharing takeaways from the article, “Adverse Childhood Experiences on Reproductive Plans and Adolescent Pregnancy in the Gulf Resilience on Women’s Health Cohort,” which shows that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) influence family planning and potential adolescent pregnancies. We chose this article due to the historic moment we are living through in regards to reproductive rights and freedom, especially for women living in the American South, as we find it important to understand the circumstances, context and reality of folks’ lives to understand the decisions they may decide to make around their own health.
Read MoreOur Louisiana Youth for Health Justice (LYHJ) Council went to the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge in May, and we have been so excited to share more about this trip with you! If you're not familiar, the LYHJ Council is made up of passionate youth leaders from across the state who are learning to advocate for reproductive, social, and racial justice, and their visit to the state capitol was one way to help build their knowledge, experience, and skills so they can be more effective as they advocate for change. See more photos and read more about this trip and the LYHJ Council's goals here.
Read MoreMary Okoth, LCSW, may be settling into her new role as the Collective for Healthy Communities (CHC) Program Manager, but she has always been weaving art, play, and nature into her role as a social worker since before she joined IWES. Luckily, there are many creative ways to incorporate into public health work, whether in therapeutic settings or out in the community. Learn why creativity and play are important tools to healing and how Mary and the social work team use them to serve their clients and the community.
Read MoreThis year’s theme for National HIV Testing Day on June 27th was “HIV Testing is Self-Care,” which resonated with all of us here at IWES, where we emphasize the importance of taking care of one’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Learn more about how keeping up with your HIV status is a part of self-care, and find out about current HIV testing options, getting and staying on treatment, connection to support, and other ways that we're here to help you on your self-care journey.
Read MoreThis past July, our Global Early Adolescent Study (GEAS) youth intern, Ekundayo Akinlana, had the incredible opportunity to represent New Orleans and the United States at the GEAS Global Youth Advisory Board Summit in Bali. He has worked with us in different capacities, including building his leadership skills and his research acumen, which culminated in him presenting work he did with other young people around the world. His representation and participation in the youth summit will help to shape the future of the GEAS study and its impact on youth worldwide. Read on to learn more about the GEAS Global Youth Advisory Board Summit and Dayo’s reflections.
Read MoreAs a public health organization connected to the community, we know that often some of the most interesting journal articles can be hard to find and hard to decipher without a public health background. That’s why we are happy to introduce a new section of the newsletter to share insightful articles and important data that we see coming out in the field of public health. To kick us off this quarter, we’re highlighting this insightful article “Pathways To Equitable And Antiracist Maternal Mental Health Care: Insights for Black Women Stakeholders” published in October of 2021 in Health Affairs and written and researched by Kay Matthews, Isabel Morgan, Kelly Davis, Tracey Estriplet, Susan Perez, and longtime IWES collaborator and friend, Joia A. Crear Perry.
Read More
