Podcast Interview Transcript
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Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships' latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscriptpodcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscriptpost-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscriptprovides 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 Karen Yeary interviews Rucha Kavathe and Mary Northridge, authors of "Building Capacity in the Sikh Asian Indian Community to Lead Participatory Oral Health Projects."
Rucha and Mary, thank you so much for joining us today for our podcast. I'm really excited to learn more about your study. Before we begin, I noticed that the community organization's name is United Sikhs, or Sikhs, and I would like just more clarification on how do we pronounce S-I-K-H-S.
Hi, Karen. Thank you so much for having us. The pronunciation for Sikhs is a shorter I pronunciation, but a lot of times, specifically because I work in public health, I've heard also pronounced as a long pronunciation with a double E, because a lot of times it's translated as "sick," as in unwell, but for the purpose of this conversation, definitely, let's use the shorter Sikhs pronunciation, like that, like a shorter ipronunciation.
Thank you so much, Rucha, and sorry for jumping the gun. I just kind of jumped into your study and your paper because I was so excited to talk about that. Let me backtrack and let you both introduce yourselves. Rucha, would you please begin?
Absolutely. So hello. My name is Rucha Kavathe. I am the associate director of United Sikhs, and we're headquartered here in New York City.
And I'm Mary Northridge. I'm an associate professor at the NYU College of Dentistry, also in New York.
Well, thank you so much for joining me, again. My first question is could you tell me more about United Sikhs and their role in the community?
Absolutely. We are a nonprofit organization. We were started in 1999, and we are headquartered, like I said, in New York City, with operations nationally and internationally. We are an organization that focuses on several different aspects of serving the Sikh American community, such as international civil and human rights advocacy, humanitarian aid, and community education and empowerment. Our public health focus is situated within the larger Community Education and Empowerment Directorate. Our public health work specifically focuses on increasing awareness of prevention and sort of promoting prevention proactively. We'd like to think of different ways that the community can get engaged in their own health and following that idea, we try to get our community resources that are in language that is culturally relevant, and sort of promotes the importance of prevention as a whole. [End Page 15]
Well, that sounds wonderful. Can you tell me more about the significance of focusing on Asian-Indian health?
I think overall, there isn't a lot of information on the health needs of the Asian-American community generally. Asian Indians specifically form a large part of the South Asian communities that live here in the United States, and I think it's important to focus on the needs of not just the Asian-Indian community, but different communities individually, because they are so varied in what their health needs are, and what kind of outcomes they have overall. And so I think for us that's the community that we serve. That's the community that we know, and we can address their concerns, like I said, in a culturally competent way, in a language-appropriate way. And so for us, it's important...
