Community Engagement: Creating Environmentally Sustainable Solutions

Presenter: Beverly Obodaifio, Psychology, Global Public Health Scholars

The Community, Engagement, Environmental Justice & Health (CEEJH) Lab focuses on working with communities to help reduce environmental contamination and ensure better sustainability while creating good relationships and partnerships with organizations, health professionals, and policymakers. For this project, I will be interning in this lab and completing various projects. The main projects I will focus on are the AARP project, which is aimed at helping with the technological literacy of the older population, and the Environmental Justice Symposium. These projects focus on educating the set communities in order to give them the resources needed to have a more sustainable solution to the various environmental issues surrounding them. In this internship, I will be aiding in the organization of these programs and the outreach to both the organizations that help with funding and the communities receiving the intended changes. This practicum will help me to explore the benefits of involving the community in the implementation of interventions as well as the importance of the environment on health overall. I will also try to gain a sense of how important community involvement is to the sustainability of an intervention.

4 Comments

Matthew Walls

May 05, 2021

What are some ideas that you personally developed for the Symposium theme?

Beverly

May 09, 2021

Replying to

Thank you for the question! As a psychology major I wanted to connect my work here and I listed environmental justice and mental health as a potential topic as well as things to do with overall EJ and racism. Also as someone in charge of the technology for the event a lot of the web aspects have many of my ideas taken into consideration.

claudia.s.bosques

Does the CEEJH lab ever work directly with community members to conduct needs assessments?

thank you for your question! yes, the needs of a community are assessed by the people to help with interventions that policy makers can then be a part of. For example the AARP project has the community asses their environment through that app and that can help determine the needs of the community for help later down the line.