Podcast Interview Transcript
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Podcast Interview Transcript
Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships'latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript.
In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor Simona Kwon interviews Shannah Tharp-Gilliam and Michael Yonas, authors of "Using Concept Mapping to Explore and Engage Parent and Youth Residents of an Economically Underserved Minority Community around Children's Asthma."
Dr. Shannah Tharp-Gilliam and Dr. Michael Yonas, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to talk with us on Beyond the Manuscript. I'm going to be asking the both of you a few questions and it would be great if you could introduce yourselves, your organization and title as you respond to the questions. So my first question is about the organizations and your academic community partnership.
Can you please describe the partnership that formed Healthy Living, Healthy Learning, Healthy Lives? And it would be great to learn specifically how long you and your organizations have partnered and if there are additional health topics that you collectively have worked on besides and building on the asthma project that you wrote about in your article.
Sure. Thank you very much for having us. First of all I would love to acknowledge our co-PIs on this project. Along with Michael and myself we have Anita Zuberi, Anna Kasunic, Patricia Bamwine, Stephanie Boddie and John Wallace. So you ask how did our partnership form. This was one of the more natural partnerships because our organizations and the university have been working together for quite a while. In fact I represent the Homewood Children’s Village. I’m the director of research and evaluation, and I’ve been at the Village for almost six years now. Dr. Wallace from the University of Pittsburgh was the founder of the Village. So this project was predicated on the relationship that started at the very beginning of our organization. And over time the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Social work, the School of Medicine, began to rally around the work that we were doing at the Homewood Children’s Village. So when the opportunity arose to partner on this project we were already familiar with each other, we had built trust with each other, and we were ready to move forward. [End Page 347]
Yeah. Thank you, Shannah and thank you Simona for having us. This is Michael Yonas. I’m currently a senior program officer for research and special initiatives at the Pittsburgh Foundation. I still remain close with the Homewood Children’s Village and at the time was serving as one of the co-academic PIs for the initiative and as Shannah mentioned, this had been built upon years’ worth of collaboration.
And I was introduced because of some of the work that I was doing related to asthma, social and environmental stressors using participatory research elsewhere in Pittsburgh. But it was clear that a strong relationship had been really well established both academic and community and then also involving many organizations within the Homewood community. And probably five maybe even eight years of I think previous work that have gone on in that space.
Thank you so much for sharing that background. I know a lot of our readers are always interested in understanding the nature of the partnerships and how long the groups have worked together.
My next question is focused on the topic of childhood asthma. How did HL-3 decide to focus on childhood asthma as a community health topic? One of the things that I thought was really interesting in...
