Cammie Dopke
GW MCH-MPH '22
For my culminating experience project I had the pleasure of working with Beacon House, a community-based afterschool and youth development program serving Ward 5, under Dr. Monica Ruiz and alongside Lavinia Sims. As part of the Building Resilient Youth Through Connection & Empowerment (BRYCE) project, Lavinia and I developed a website providing behavioral health resources for youth and caregivers in the Beacon House community informed by the youth mental health needs assessment Da-Shunnda Hayward-White, a Howard MSW graduate student, conducted in 2020. We met with the Beacon House team on a weekly basis to ensure the website was tailored to address the needs of the community it serves and to devise an appropriate data collection plan. Lavinia and I collected data over a two week period in which we visited Beacon House and talked directly with parents, caregivers, and youth within the community to hear their perspective on the website and its acceptability. The findings suggest that this website is high in feasibility and is a relevant and innovative resource that will benefit the community. Overall, it was an incredible learning experience to collaborate with Beacon House to develop a community-tailored and informed resource that will hopefully promote positive mental health and well-being for all youth and caregivers in DC.
Lavinia Sims
GW MCH-MPH '22
For my culminating experience (CE), I had the opportunity to work with Beacon House on their Building Resilient Youth Through Connection and Empowerment (BRYCE) project. The purpose of this project is to help build a community foundation that addresses youth mental health needs and help parents and caregivers learn ways to support youth mental health. As a Summer 2022 Practice Fellow, I worked alongside Cammie Dopke to create an online mental health resources directory (www.youthmentalhealthdc.com) that allows users to access a variety of mental health resources as they want to receive them, whether that be in-person, online, or via apps, hotlines, podcasts, and videos. For my CE, I continued to work with Cammie to evaluate the website we created to determine its acceptability and feasibility.
During this experience, I gained essential communication, analytic, strategy, evaluation, and process-thinking skills that have helped me both inside the classroom and in the professional setting. While completing my CE project, I was also enrolled in MCH II – Advanced Research Methods and Program Evaluation. I am grateful for this because I was able to take what I learned from each of these courses to supplement my experience in the data collection and analyses processes of my CE project and use my experiences from my CE project to supplement what I was learning in these courses. For example, one of the biggest lessons learned throughout the course of my practice fellowship and CE was the importance of strong communication skills, especially as it relates to stakeholder relationships.
I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with and learn from Beacon House, members of the Edgewood community, as well as Dr. Monica Ruiz, and to create such an innovative and useful resource. I highly recommend students to apply to fellowship opportunities, such as the one I did with Beacon House, because they are a wonderful way to develop your public health skills, get involved with the community, and can ultimately lead into other opportunities, such as the CE project.
