COVID-19 & Racial Justice Community Scholar Research Pilot Award Funding
Five internally-funded grants provided by the Center for Clinical and Translational Science, the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy totaling $50,000 have been provided to five UIC researchers. The Strike Force received 15 exceptionally competitive grant applications within a brief 3-week period and provided decisions to applicants within a week of the submission deadline. Thank you to our Review Committee members, Iván Arenas, Joy Getzenberg, Angela Walden, and Nancy Tartt, and our Review Committee Co-Chairs, Joe Hoereth and Jennie Brier, for lending their time and expertise in providing a quick turnaround to applicants!
UIC-PACT Pilot Awardees Project Summaries:
1. Saria Lofton, Ph.D., RN: "Grow Your Groceries (GYG) Evaluation"
Dr. Lofton's project will aim to systematically evaluate the GYG program by understanding the barriers and facilitators of using the GYG kits, seek community input of redesigning the GYG kits, pilot the new GYG kits in target communities, and disseminate the collaborative process to local organizations and academic audiences.
2. Pamela Pearson, DNP, CNM.: "Melanated Midwives"
Dr. Pearson's project will aim to deepen an equitable partnership with the community-based organization, Melanated Midwives, as a means of supporting innovative community-based research to address structural racism in healthcare. As part of the project, two community advisory boards (CABs) will be generated to provide ideas for centering the voices of Black mothers and making Melanated Group Midwifery Care (MGMC) sustainable and scalable. Secondly, the project will seek to establish a collaboration with the Chicago Black Doula Association (CBDA) to facilitate the community-based in-home visitation component of MGMC.
3. Barbara Ransby, Ph.D.: "Equity and Transformation (EAT) Collaboration"
Dr. Ransby's project seeks to design, implement, and share research around issues of health, broadly defined, as they relate to issues of police reform, prison, and police abolition. More specifically, a community scholar will help research attitudes toward abolitionist demands among Black informal workers in Chicago, gather data on experiences and opinions around the nexus of criminal justice, incarceration, public safety, health implications, and share these findings.
4. Gayatri Reddy, Ph.D. and Anna Guevarra, Ph.D.: "Winthrop Family Oral History Interviews"
Drs. Reddy and Guevarra project will aim to capture memories, stories, and the collective historicizing of life, love, and care, as well as the intentional practices of community-building that produced the 300+ current members of the Winthrop Family that have survived and thrived for over a century. In doing so, this project will help to redress the gaps in the preservation of historical accounts of the Black community by preserving the lived experiences of the Winthrop family and to help showcase lessons in how to navigate a segregated city and nation with sustained hope and care.
5. Laurie Reynolds: "Chicago 400 Alliance Webinar Series"
Professor Reynold's project will curate and present symposium/video/oral history series that allows the Chicago 400 to represent their lives in real-time—featuring scholars, policymakers, and criminal justice and victim advocates for research presentations and panels. This series will explain how registry and banishment laws and the entire registration apparatus required to maintain them is a form of ongoing, forced, adversarial police contact—and an engine of reincarceration.