In my role as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Cincinnati, I work with communities to broaden participation in research and fight for health equity. I am passionate about contributing to CCPH because I found a much-needed professional home in the CCPH network. I was fortunate to receive high-quality training as a clinical psychologist, but during my doctoral studies, I became frustrated by the disconnect between the evidence-based treatment protocols I learned about in classes and the experiences of the children and families I worked within the community. I discovered community-based participatory research as an orientation to my work that would allow lived experience expertise to guide research and make it more relevant and sustainable in the real world. Ever since I’ve built a career working in partnership with community members for health equity. For example, for the last six years, I’ve worked with Latinos Unidos por la Salud (LU-Salud), a team of Latino immigrants doing research to improve health of Latinos in Cincinnati. With funding from the Corporation for National and Community Service, I am currently working with a team of refugee co-researchers representing seven different communities to improve civic engagement for refugees in our city. I also have an NIH-funded grant that engages high school students as co-researchers investigating drug abuse and addiction in their own communities.
In addition to my own community-partnered research, I have become more interested in facilitating new partnerships, including connecting community organizations and stakeholders to faculty who have never before engaged in collaborative research. For the last nine years, I have been coordinating the Community Health Grant program through our local CTSA-funded Center or Clinical and Translational Science and Training (CCTST). This program funds academic and community partners to do collaborative research that contributes to science and benefits our local community. Through the Community Health Grants, I have been able funnel almost a million dollars toward community-academic partnerships, and they have gone on to leverage these funds toward almost ten million dollars in support so far.
As a member of CCPH’s Board of Directors, I hope to contribute to the development of CCPH as a home for those across academic disciplines and community sectors to connect with one another around a shared passion for rigorous research that is built from community experience and has direct, tangible community impact. Coming from a discipline that did not emphasize community partnership as a core value of research, I felt somewhat isolated when I started my career dedicated to viewing my research through a community-based participatory research lens. Through the in-person meetings and listserv discussions, CCPH made me realize that there were other researchers who shared these values. The network has given me so much, not only in terms of professional validation but also in nuts-and-bolts advice and research innovations that I have incorporated into my work. Being a member of CCPH connects you to a professional family that believes in the same things you do: that we’re only going to see change doing research with people instead of on people, and that research has little meaning if it doesn’t contribute to real-world change.
Written by:
Farrah Jacquez, PhD, MA
Professor of Psychology at the University of Cincinnati
CCPH Board Member
