BUSSW Faculty, Staff, Students & Alumni Share Community Engagement Expertise Through CTSI Speaker Series
Faculty, staff, doctoral students, and alumni from Boston University School of Social Work (BUSSW) brought community engagement expertise to the university and beyond this year with a speaker series hosted through the BU Clinical & Translational Science Institute’s (CTSI) Community Engagement Program.
The Building a Culture of Community Engagement Speaker Series was led by Linda Sprague Martinez, BUSSW professor and co-lead of the CTSI Community Engagement Core; Melanie Rocco (SSW’21, SPH’22), project director and a BUSSW alum; and Dema Hakim, the program’s former community engagement program manager.
The coordination team brought ten virtual events to the BU community in the 2022-2023 academic year. Among their 36 presenters, many were members of the BUSSW community, including doctoral students Cristina Araujo Brinkerhoff and Lea Vugic; professors Astraea Augsberger, Jordana Muroff and Margaret Lombe; lecturer Emilia Bianco; and Mojdeh Rohani, a former lecturer and BRIDGE co-director. Their presentation topics ranged from academic-community partnerships to relapse prevention for Spanish speakers. In total, nearly 900 individuals from BU and the public attended the events.
Takeaways and details from the series, as well as helpful research resources, are compiled in a year-end report here.
In the upcoming academic year, Prof. Augsberger will assume primary leadership of the coordination team. An expert in youth and family engagement within institutions like child welfare and education, Astraea Augsberger, PhD, has served as an expert advisor on youth engagement strategies and best practices on multiple federal, state, and local advisory boards. Her research is widely disseminated in scholarly journals such as Health Affairs, Children and Youth Services Review, American Journal of Community Psychology, and Journal of Adolescent Research, and draws from her years of experience as a clinical social work practitioner.