Funded Projects

Julie Poehlmann-Tynan, Professor, Human Development and Family Studies, School of Human Ecology

Children with incarcerated parents are exposed to more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) than any group of children. Despite their high risk for developmental problems, few interventions are available for children with incarcerated parents. In this project, Professor Poehlmann-Tynan was asked to work with a program for children with incarcerated parents, Cultural Connections, and Lake View Elementary School to evaluate and expand the model of support they are using for these children.

Vivien Ahrens, Ph.D. student, School of Human Ecology

Carolina Sarmiento, Assistant Professor, Civil Society and Community Studies, School of Human Ecology

Centro Hispano of Dane County’s after-school programs support over 250 youth annually through mentoring, tutoring and hands-on workshops around leadership, wellbeing, college- preparation, and career development. To strengthen youth voice in its programs, Centro started an innovative pilot project at East High School in the 2019-20 school year: The Centro Hispano Youth Evaluation Team. They led a discussion about their experiences at the “2019 Social Justice and Evaluation Conference” and presented their findings to East High School staff and the Centro Hispano Board of Directors. The students not only provided unexpected insights, but also gained confidence in public speaking and built critical inquiry and systematic analysis skills. Based on these positive experiences, this project will support Centro Hispano to continue this initiative and scale up youth-led evaluation across all programs.

Gretchen Trast, Ph.D. student, Civil Society and Community Studies, School of Human Ecology

Affordable childcare is increasingly inaccessible for many low-income workers and workers of color, including many workers in the direct care industry. Soaring Independent Cooperative, a local home care agency founded by Black women, has identified this challenge as a research priority. Their employees will be co-researchers, providing the cooperative with the opportunity to build organizational capacity for answering questions and solving problems affecting their community. This project will explore the interdependent phenomena between childcare and direct care labor, using an explicit social justice and participatory focus to build community power and community infrastructure to meet the childcare needs of everyone in Madison.

Ally Shepherd, Ph.D. student in Educational Policy Studies

Walker Frahm, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer, Lifting Hands International, Long-Term

Accommodation Camp, Serres, Greece

Today over 65 million people worldwide are forcibly displaced from ongoing conflicts. These refugees are often placed in long-term accommodations before resettling in a new country, and language education is an important part of resettlement for refugees. While children have the right to education (and thus language classes) as ratified by international treaties, adults are not guaranteed access to education, despite needing language skills to support basic needs like healthcare, training, and employment. Lifting Hands International, a long-term accommodation camp in Greece, recognizes this challenge and wants to align its services with the priorities of the refugees they serve.

This project will center refugee voices as participants and co-researchers to learn about refugee educational priorities at Lifting Hands International and help the organization improve services in such a changing environment, paying particular attention to the challenging decision refugees face in choosing a language to learn with an uncertain future.

Carolina Sarmiento, Assistant Professor, Civil Society and Community Studies, School of Human Ecology

Amy Hilgendorf, Associate Director of Engaged Research, Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies (The CommNS), School of Human Ecology

Ethen Pollard, PhD student, Civil Society and Community Studies, School of Human Ecology

Nicholas De Marsh, PhD student, Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture

Mahnker Dahnweih, Community Power Building Coordinator, Freedom Inc.

Freedom Inc.’s Community Survey is a community-based research project that corresponds directly to Freedom Inc.’s campaigns around community and school health and safety. Data collection will cover all of Madison and inform Freedom Inc.’s No Cops In Schools, Community Control, and Invest in Youth campaigns. Potentially, this data will be used for next level work and future campaigns, such as a citywide people’s budget. This research builds on a pilot of this project this past Fall 2019 in the Atwood neighborhood and will expand the project throughout other areas in Madison, Wisconsin.

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke, Associate Professor, English

Ben Sellers, Undergraduate student, Forest Science, College of Agricultural & Life Sciences

Tamara Dean, Member of the Board of Directors, Driftless Writing Center

Stories from the Flood is an ambitious project housed in the Driftless Writing Center to collect and share stories about recent flooding in the rural and underresourced Kickapoo and Coon Creek watersheds. The project aims to put a voice and face to catastrophic flooding in the region, helping flood-affected residents of the Kickapoo and Coon Creek watersheds process their trauma, while creating a historical record that might inform future planning and support community healing. This project will expand this collaboration to more specifically focus on the analysis of the Stories from the Flood archive, transcribing over 23 hours of oral history interviews to support their wider dissemination, and extending the GIS spatial analyses of the oral history archive.

David Rosenthal, Professor, Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, School of Education

Susan Smedema, Associate Professor, Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, School of Education

Xiaolei Tang, Ph.D. Candidate, Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education, School of Education

Rozy Manazo, Licensed Psychologist (El Salvador), Servicios de Psicologia de Chalatenango

Cristina Starr – On-ground coordinador in El Salvador

Clare Norelle, Licensed Community Yoga Teacher, Greenroot Yoga LLC

Hannah Fry, Certified Rehabilitation Counselor, Yahara House

This project grew from relationships and networks developed through decades of work by the Madison-Arcatao Sister City Project. In 2017, a delegation to El Salvador explored medical, educational, and rehabilitation needs of persons with chronic illness and disability and survivors of decades of war by listening to community members. Based on the findings of the delegation and stated desire of leaders and community members in Arcatao, this project will fully implement a relevant, culturally responsive, and sustainable mental health promotion program in the community of Arcatao that was co-developed with community partners. This project will implement long-term, sustainable mental health promotion supports in the region by 1) Supporting Community Resiliency Model® (CRM) training opportunities for local practitioners; 2) Scaling the mental health promotion project to two additional Salvadoran communities; and 3) Creating a generalizable model of localized mental health promotion programs.

Hamidreza Nassiri, PhD student, Communication Arts

Alaura Borealis, Education Outreach Director, Arts & Literature Laboratory

The stories of different people presented in the media are limited in scope and often biased. There exists a huge inequality among groups of people when it comes to accessibility to media production. While this situation has improved since the introduction of digital technologies, many groups are still left out. Racial and sexual minorities and working class people are among the main groups suffering from this marginalization; their stories are either not presented in the media at all or are shown from an outsider’s point of view.

This project will support filmmaking workshops with cellphones for underrepresented communities in Madison in partnership with Arts & Literature Laboratory (ALL), Madison Public Library, and UW Odyssey Project. Building upon previous successful workshops, the new iterations will take place in Summer 2020 for 8 weeks (one session per week), with one workshop series for adults and one for high-school students. The participants will be chosen from a pool of applicants, and the priority will be given to people coming from low-income and racial minority families.

Karla Ausderau, Associate Professor, Kinesiology

Multiple graduate and undergraduate students

Multiple staff members of the Madison Metropolitan School District

The primary goals of the SAPAR program for pregnant and parenting teenagers are to increase graduation rates, increase enrollment in post-secondary education, decrease repeat pregnancy prior to 19 years in age, and increase parenting knowledge and skills. The Ausderau Research Lab and Occupational Therapy program have been collaborating with the SAPAR program for over seven years through many activities designed to meet the needs of the community collaborator as well as providing a rich learning environment for Occupational Therapy Program students. The SAPAR Program will be moving locations within the next two to three years, and SAPAR staff want to use this transitional time to reevaluate the current and future structure of the program to best meet the needs of pregnant and parenting teenagers in the larger Madison community. This project will provide support for the Ausderau Lab to support this evaluation.

Lara Gerassi, Assistant Professor, Social Work

Scott Kornish, Division Manager, Youth & Family Services, Outagamie County Health & Human Services

Mary Krumplitsch, Supervisor, Youth & Family Services, Outagamie County Health & Human Services

Child welfare agencies are mandated to investigate allegations of sex trafficking (ST) in children and youth. Outagamie County’s Youth and Family Services (YFS) Division was tasked with responding to suspected and confirmed ST cases in the northeast region of Wisconsin (17 counties and three tribes), and they have been partnering with Professor Gerassi to understand how local practitioners (in working with youth in and aging out of foster care, homeless youth, victims of intimate partner violence, etc.) provide services to this population. Practitioners who knowingly encounter individuals at risk of ST experience multiple challenges in providing inclusive, evidence-based practices. This project will work with YFS to enhance the collective response to ST among all social service providers in the Northeast region of Wisconsin by determining whether and how regional providers screen for ST and provide inclusive services, developing and testing a regionally relevant, inclusive ST training tailored to social service providers in the Northeast region of WI, and enhancing regional providers’ knowledge about and preparedness to encounter ST individuals.

Laura Livingston, Ph.D. student, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies

Joseph Stein, General Manager, MoringaConnect

MoringaConnect services Ghanaian moringa farmers to move smallholder farming families from

poverty to prosperity through moringa, a tree locally known as “the miracle tree”. This organization requested help to evaluate their educational programming and the impacts of their programming through transformative evaluation, a type of evaluation that centers the voices of the least heard in order to increase justice and equity in the evaluation process. The goals of this project are (1) to work with farmers and other stakeholders to create evaluation tools that are culturally responsive and reflective of stakeholder goals for the program, (2) for farmers and agricultural educators to use the evaluation tools to increase equity and improve the program, and (3) to generate data on how farmers and other stakeholders understand and value the cross-cultural participatory evaluation process.

Aydin Bal, Associate Professor, Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education

School of Education graduate students

In the United States, youth from racially minoritized communities disproportionately receive exclusionary school discipline (suspension, expulsion, and detention) more severely and frequently for less objective reasons such as disrespect. In Wisconsin, Native American students are two times more likely to receive exclusionary discipline and placed in special education as “emotionally disturbed” compared to White students. This project addresses racial disproportionality by developing a culturally responsive school wide behavioral support

system with Native American students, families, and community leaders and educators at a public high school in Northern Wisconsin using the Culturally Responsive Positive Interventions and Supports (CRPBIS) framework and the Learning Lab methodology.

Olayinka Shiyanbola, Associate Professor, Pharmacy

Mattigan Mott, Undergraduate, Pharmacy

Donna Shepard, Community Research Associate, Unite MKE Milwaukee

This project aims to decrease diabetes-related challenges among African Americans in Milwaukee through the integration of Peers LEAD, a community-engaged culturally appropriate

intervention to increase medication adherence, into an existing community-based diabetes self-

management program. 40% of Milwaukee County residents are said to be at risk of diabetes compared to the 25% Wisconsin state average. This project will connect UW health sciences students to the African American community through student engagement in group education sessions and AA patient advisory board meetings.