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“I remember the skills we learned and put them into practice”: An Evaluation of a Peer Support Training Program for Veterans
Full text linkCommunity-based organizations (CBOs) are critical sources of support for veterans. CBOs offer innovative and informed initiatives and are often nexuses that allow veterans and their allies to gather. Out of a commitment to veteran reintegration, Growing Veterans (GV), a veteran-founded CBO located in western Washington, created and implemented an evidence-based peer support training program (PST) for veterans and their allies. Building upon years of collaboration, GV partnered with the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to conduct a formative evaluation of GV’s PST program, funded through the Bob Woodruff Foundation. The evaluation revealed that participants described the PST in largely positive ways and reported using learned skills with both veterans and nonveterans across their personal and professional lives. Specifically, participants reported learning tools through the PST that increased their patience, mindfulness, awareness, empathy, and confidence, resulting in improved interpersonal relationships and communications across multiple domains. The success of this community-engaged collaboration was due in part to the inclusion of veterans, allies, GV employees, and VHA evaluators throughout the evaluation, from grant applications to the final analysis. Using ethnographic methods of participant observation, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and surveys, VHA evaluators were able to gain a deep understanding of participants’ experiences of the PST as well as the program’s perceived usefulness
Book Review: Terrorists, Anarchists and Democrats: The Genevans and the Irish in Time of Revolution by Richard Whatmore
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Extended Commentary: Examining January 6th: Rights, Human Rights, and the Human Rights “Age”
Full text linkThis extended commentary looks at the question of January 6th from the perspective of rights claims and ideas of the human rights “age.” Suggesting that though, yes, human rights can be understood as “international rights” and concerned with intervention, human rights are also a basic claim to rights’ inherence and the idea that essential civil and political privileges are something all should have. To say the least, January 6th cannot be understood as a “human rights riot.” From actors’ subjective perspectives, however, we might be able to see the event and trends around it gaining succor from an atmosphere in which inalienable rights are forwarded as a given, people feel a right to claim them, and in which, out of a gestalt sense that the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the “era of rights,” the concept becomes a discursive point of appeal for all manner of political grievances. Here, we are confronted with questions of how and why rights have come to be intuitively invoked by so many actors and what this means for the play of rights ideas in today’s environment. That is again given that lefts and rights, activists and citizens, progressives and reactionaries all appear to invoke “inalienable” if not “human” rights as a mode of grounding any number of cultural and political claims
University-School Partnerships: 10 Lessons Learned Over the Past 10 Years
Full text linkThere are multiple examples in the literature of universities and school districts coming together to form partnerships to effectively meet the needs of children and adolescents. University-school partnerships can be mutually beneficial to both types of institutions for several reasons, including the opportunities they provide for sharing resources and conducting meaningful, evidence-based, practice-informed research. While university-school partnerships are critical for identifying points of intervention in schools and for improving children’s physical health, mental health, and academic outcomes, substantial barriers exist to forming successful partnerships. Potential partner institutions need information on how to create trusting and mutually beneficial university-school partnerships. This paper summarizes 10 lessons learned over the past 10 years from a successful university-school partnership and provides tangible ideas and strategies for others who hope to engage in similarly successful partnerships
Developing Community-Appropriate Sleep Apnea Messaging Through Appreciative Inquiry and Boot Camp Translation: A Qualitative Study
Full text linkUndiagnosed sleep apnea is a substantial burden in the United States, leading to negative health impacts and unnecessary costs. Diagnosing sleep apnea is challenging due to a lack of evidence to justify universal screening and discomfort associated with sleep studies. This study used semi-structured, individual interviews (N = 12) to examine how community members with sleep apnea become diagnosed and identify effective strategies to manage their condition. Findings from these interviews, in turn, were used to develop messaging campaigns intended to increase community members’ awareness of undetected sleep apnea. Influences from a variety of social and health care–related sources helped participants identify effective treatment strategies. Delays occurred at multiple points in the diagnostic process from symptom recognition through treatment, and finding effective treatment required trial and error. There is room to improve sleep apnea screening and diagnosis efforts in ambulatory care settings to better address high rates of undiagnosed sleep apnea. Community- and clinic-based strategies to incorporate sleep into patient–provider discussions and screen more broadly for sleep disorders could reduce the prevalence and duration of untreated sleep apnea
Does Cultivating a Giving Culture Make People More Willing to Share Counter-Normative Ideas?
Full text linkThis study examines and supports the hypothesis that cultivating a giving culture makes people more willing to share counter-normative ideas as compared to those not engaged in such a culture, regardless of their existing giver/taker tendency measured by the Give & Take scale. A giving culture was manipulated using Adam Grant’s Reciprocity Ring, an exercise that employs the pay-it-forward principle. Results showed that participants who underwent the Reciprocity Ring were more likely to share counter-normative ideas with others in their group than those who did not. Implications of the findings are discussed
