Seed Grant Award: Justice and Pandemics Preparedness Academy

Spring 2021 Update:

The Academy began in September with a welcome orientation session followed by a series of three foundational lectures on consecutive evenings providing students with an overview of COVID and structural racism. 

In the third component of the Academy, each student participated in a mentored research or service project. The projects/faculty mentors from which students could choose were: COVID-19 Student Service Corps; On the Frontlines: Nursing Leadership in Pandemics; The Workplace Center; Bearing Witness: The COVID-19 and Inequality History Documentation Project; Evaluating the Justice and Pandemics Preparedness Academy; and “Banning the Box” on College Applications in the United States. Several students took advantage of the option of designing their own project and carrying it out under the supervision of a faculty mentor we assigned.

The grant recipients are now in the process of assigning students to their mentored projects. This semester’s options will be: COVID-19 Student Service Corps; Telehealth “verzuz” Radical Telehealing: Reimagining Digital Social Media as Virtual Healing Spaces for Black Women; the New York COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive; Data Analytic on COVID-19 Testing; Social Marketing Strategy to Encourage COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake; or a self-designed student project.

Students who participated in the Academy had the opportunity to propose mini-grants to address structural racism and pandemics preparedness.

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.