Neuroscience Outreach Improves Research and Benefits Communities

DAMIEN FAIR:

I have the pleasure of introducing Anita Randolph as our main speaker today. I've known Anita for many years now. She came actually to my lab as a postdoc and just flourished, doing all types of work around her neuroscience, public outreach.

She became the founding director of the Community Engagement Education Hub at my institute, the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain — turned that into an amazing entity. She’s also an assistant professor now in the Pediatrics department at the University of Minnesota. She’s a first-generation, underrepresented minority neuroscientist, and she’s focusing on mental health and addiction research.

She’s done, I don’t know how many community events. Her energy is, unmatched, I would say, by anybody, by far. She’s committed to supporting undergraduate work, graduate students. She does community engagement, mentoring, research, academic advising, curriculum development. It’s just an amazing style of work.

But it’s not just here; she’s done this work internationally in Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa. She’s really been all over the place. And she’s just getting started. So, I am just so happy to have Anita come up here and tell us about her work. Thank you so much, Anita, for all you’ve done. Let’s give her a round of applause and welcome her. 

ANITA RANDOLPH:

Hi! Good to see everyone. Your video was awesome, by the way. I loved your video; it was super cool.

Today, I’m just going to highlight a lot of the work I was doing with Damien since I joined his team back in 2019 and all the work we’ve been doing at the University of Minnesota. The talk is, “Flourishing with Community: Leveraging Multiple Sources of Knowledge to Evaluate Basic Science Research and Drive Collective Benefit with the Community.”

A lot of the work that we’ve done so far together has been highlighted in one of our articles that’s here on the screen. So if you’d like to learn more, check out our article, and I’m here to connect as well after today’s talk. It outlines how we were really thorough in building a lot of our infrastructure and creating a lot of action-oriented community engagement work and community-engaged research for the community.

So much of my work — I just love people. I love talking, I love connecting, I love hanging out. And so I spend a lot of time with community. The first picture on the left is me and my husband. I drag him everywhere with me in the community. My sister is from Atlanta, but she already knows that when she comes and visits us in Minnesota, she goes out with us.

So, it’s me, and my husband, and my little sister. We were out at this community event, planting sunflowers around town. And so, I just love this picture so much. This is just kind of to show that you can do engagement in so many spaces — not just in academia, in our buildings. But you can also go out in community and have fun.

And then the video on the right — they had a community event at a bowling alley, but we didn’t bowl; we ended up dancing the whole night. And I looked over, and my husband was dancing salsa with like all the old ladies in the neighborhood, and we were just having a really good time. I always share this video — it’s like, you know, it’s not just gardening and academia; it could be at a bowling alley, it could be at a salsa party.

We just do so many fun things, and it just speaks to the testament of also leadership at MIDB and Damien, because Damien trusted me so much to just go in the community and just have all of these conversations.

So, we held over 300 semi-structured focus groups in settings like this. We would have focus groups in bowling alleys, at dance parties, at garden shows, on campus, and things like that. And it was in these intimate settings that we were really able to build a lot with community, and we really coined this community-first model in our institute, that Damien is the co-director of.

And so, with community on our side, the building was just being built. They would put on a hard hat, they would come out, they would talk. It was in the middle of a pandemic, too. So, they would even Zoom and meet with Damien and other people in leadership.

And so, I really love these pictures that kind of show how, in academia, we can actually bring community alongside no matter what phase you're in, no matter what stage you're in in your project. Community can be right there with you from the beginning. And then with the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain, it was literally the beginning because there was no building when I first moved there, and they were there building the building alongside, with us.

And so, this is one of my favorite rooms in the building. It is this beautiful mural that was painted by an art teacher in her elementary school class. We have these different quiet rooms that was also thought about by family members, and said, “Hey, we have kids with different developmental disorders. We need a quiet room when we come into the institute for doctor’s appointments,” or, “We need a playroom when they do their assessments. Their siblings can have some type of entertainment,” or, “We need adult changing tables in our bathroom.”

All of that came from community through this process of just having them involved in the building of the building. So, that was something that was very awesome, a great learning experience for me. Because in academia, you don’t really get to bring community from the beginning with you. So, I’m very appreciative of Damien and all the other leadership at the U that allowed community to be building the building with us in real-time.

And so, as we did these 300 focus groups, community really talked with us about so many things. But there’s one thing that stood out, a lot: They kept saying, “Where is our space?” And we were like, “The building is your space.” They were like, “No, no, no, where’s my space without my kids?” And we were really confused by that because the institute is a pediatric clinic. And we were like, “Well, don’t you need your kids in a pediatric clinic?”

And then we started to come up with creative ways for community members to come and join us in the institute, free of kids, and have their own adult time if they so wanted to. And so, with that, I coined this program, the “Open Doors” program, where community can come in and have so many different events. And we have so many different gatherings, and social spaces, and things like that at the institute.

And so in this, we have this really cool community center that’s there that you can check out that’s totally free for the community to come and have whatever event that they want. And we’ve hosted so many different things. We started hosting Black community gatherings with Angeline Dukes. We’ve been having a blast there, and this was a lot of the pictures from a couple of our different events that we have.

We have ice cream socials there. We always have food. We play trivia games. We just have a really big blast. And from there, we expanded our gatherings to include Latinx gatherings, because everybody was like, “Hey, where’s my gathering?” Right, so, over the semesters, we’ve added so many.

And then also, the community was like, “Hey, you remember when I said, ‘Where’s my space?’ I was serious.” And so, we hosted an anniversary for a nonprofit in Minneapolis; it’s one of my favorite groups. They are a group home for teenage moms who are unhoused. And so, if you are unhoused, and a teenager, and you deliver in the hospital, they don’t call CPS — which is a major milestone for us in Minneapolis. I’m very, very proud of that.

They call this organization, they come and pick up mom and baby, and mom and baby can stay at this group home for 3 years. And they have everything in-house: They have daycare there that’s free, full-time so that moms can go to school. They have social workers to come and help people get birth certificates, social security cards, any type of government assistance. They can do all of that in-house there. So, I’m very happy that we were able to host organizations like this and really support the community, so they can have a really awesome place to have their different anniversaries.

And so, we also have like back-to-school drives and all types of fun activities. My favorite is this Healing Fair that we have. The community wanted sound bathing, which I thought was very nice. And they gave out free massages that day. This was an example of a mostly adult event at a ped’s hospital or a ped’s clinical institute, and so this was one of my favorite events that was carried out there.

And so, one of the things that I thought was really interesting and that showed that — how connected we were with the community is that a lot of the community started to ask for research, which was really shocking. A lot of times in community engagement, we never bring up — I don’t bring up the word “research.”

And then that was really awesome that so many of the communities of color — Hmong, Korean, African-American, Latinx, Native groups — was like, “No, Anita, we trust you. We’ve been hanging out with you a long time. Let’s start doing some research.”

And so, one of the first projects that I kind of pulled on as a lot of my work in Africa; I worked in a lot of the psychiatric hospitals and the different orphanages. And we do a lot of work through storytelling.

And so, one of the first things an Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota wanted me to collaborate on was this project and create this culturally appropriate mental health workbook for their teens on their reservations. So, I worked with these three beautiful women creating these mental health workbook for teens and tweens that is more culturally specific for our Native populations. But anybody can use it.

And so, we worked with all of the teens there; they voted on the topic. Their topic was anxiety. And they developed these three characters — Ashanti, Mina, and Charlie. And so, they developed the story; we had a really good time; we created this really awesome comic book. If you guys want a copy of the comic book, talk to me after the talk, and I can mail some out for you.

But they developed this story and just talking about how many stressors they had at that time, which was going back to school in 2021. And one of the things that I really loved, and I learned a lot, is they also had culturally specific activities that was very near and dear to them culturally, as identifying as Ojibwe.

So, they have these body scan exercises that are connected to their culture. They like to meditate with sounds, so they created these meditation activities that are all in this handbook as well. And then we were also very specific on having resources that were culturally specific to them and that they felt comfortable with, and that's what we added into this workbook as well. So, this is one of my favorite projects that kind of came from hanging out with community, and it has coloring pages as well.

And then another thing we were able to do there was this equity-driven research. In the community, they were having a really hard time with prenatal methamphetamine exposure, which I had no idea was a problem in Minnesota at that time. And I'm super glad that the community even brought it up to me as a meth researcher.

And so, we started working with the school systems, the different health commissioners to try to figure out how do we support our community right now with prenatal methamphetamine exposure. And so, we started working with the adoption medicine clinic to develop this whole new line of research for community. So, it’s been an awesome experience. It’s turned me into a health informaticist, which I never knew was going to happen. But you know, you tell the community you’re going to be a bottom-up researcher, and they bring you ideas: You’ve got to figure it out.

So, this was like one of the first health informatics projects that we started launching at the institute. And so, we have this really awesome ability to take electronic health records and turn them into a researchable database, not just for us researchers, but we also have given it back to the county as well, so that they can learn, and create new policies, and create new F-codes, and ICD codes that now these kids can actually get services that they weren't actually getting before. So, I’m really excited and very proud of this database that was community-driven — 100% community idea.

And the last thing I’ll talk about is our Minnesota Youth Needs Assessment. This was also another community-driven project. We have a lot of PIs here. These are all community members, and they wanted to create new resources for youth around mental health and substance use.

And so, we've been out in the community talking to youth and talking to different nonprofit organizations for the past year. And we developed so many fun things. And so, here’s just a list of the many community partners that we have worked with and just talked about how our work has been community engagement and hanging out is now morphing into community-engaged research for the first time.

So, I’m really proud of all these list of partners here. I’m just very thankful for their support, thankful for all the leadership support at MIDB to be able to make all of these pivots. And here’s a lot of these different assessments and tools that we have co-developed with the community over the years. So, I’m really proud of that. And I think this is where I’m going to end. They gave me 10 minutes, and I wanted to do it all. So, there we have it!