Seed Grant Award: Addressing Racism Through Education, Intentional Recruitment & Advocacy

During this time of renewed national attention to the structural inequities that continue to pervade our criminal punishment, healthcare, and education systems, we feel it is critical that the Columbia-New York Presbyterian family medicine residency program lead the way in prioritizing equity within our admissions practices and directly addressing structural racism within our system. Specifically, our proposal incorporates three main objectives:

1. To educate our faculty and residents through multidisciplinary as well as multi-modal approaches on how racism impacts our patients and colleagues on a daily basis at structural, institutional, and interpersonal levels.
2. To create an admissions representation committee (ARC) with the goal of increasing recruitment and retention of under-represented minorities (URMs) in the residency program by a minimum of 33%
3. To create a community medicine and advocacy track (CMAT) within the residency program that residents can choose to complete for the purpose of attaining specific skills in physician advocacy for the surrounding community and gaining experience in community engagement

This project was funded through the Addressing Racism: A Call to Action for Higher Education initiative of the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement.