SPH 563 - MCHB

Course: SPH 563, Evaluation in Public Health with instructor Dr. Rebecca Gokiert (Winter 2024)

Students

• Mary Honardar, MSc in the General Public Health program (1st year)

• Ritika Patel, Master's in Public Health, specializing in Health Economic Evaluation (1st year)

• Umaira Behzad, Master in Public Health with a concentration in Global Health (1st year)

• Aaliyah Jafarian-Oshtbin, Master in Public Health (1st year)

• Tyra, Masters of Arts in Community Engagement (1st year)

• Newmoon Rahman, Masters of Public Health, General MPH (1st year)

Who was your community partner, and can you describe the project objectives?

Our community partner was Edmonton’s Multicultural Health Brokers (MCHB) Co-op. Established around 25 years ago, the MCHB began the public health initiative of serving the newcomer community by enhancing their health and welfare and aiding them in their transition and adaptation to a Canadian lifestyle. Our project within SPH 563 required us to collaborate with our representative, Celia Luo, to create an impact evaluation plan for the volunteer program (which is a part of the Grocery Run Program [GRP], embedded within the MCHB). The goal of the GRP is to deliver hampers to vulnerable families that are unable to meet their basic nutritional needs. Subsequently, the volunteers of the GRP are an essential driving force for the program’s success as they help package the hampers the MCHB receives and deliver these packages directly to the families and communities in need. As SPH 563 students, our goal was to create an evaluation plan that explores the impact of the volunteer program on the volunteers themselves. This semester, our team worked with the MCHB to create/propose a simple and digestible arts-based intervention that elucidates the perspectives of the volunteers involved with GRP.

What was the biggest takeaway from your CSL placement?

Overall, this CSL placement has been a wonderful experience for our team. One of the biggest takeaways from this project has been the bidirectional collaboration the MCHB necessitated and the amount of effort, dedication, and content creation it required of us to maintain a successful yet significant relationship. Additionally, the different requirements and needs of the volunteers at the GRP taught us the importance of applying innovative communication tools/interventions to effectively understand the perspectives and experiences of individuals when generating evaluation plans.

Even if you think you have the most innovative and creative ideas when creating an evaluation plan for an organization to implement, the biggest factors to keep in mind are feasibility and quality over quantity.

How can you apply any newly gained knowledge/skills to your future endeavors (courses/employment/volunteering)?

We acquired many skills centered around fostering inclusive environments, irrespective of individuals' challenges. Within the MCHB, our volunteers possess diverse linguistic abilities and exhibit varying degrees of physical capability. Collaborative teamwork and innovative thinking were imperative to develop a comprehensive intervention. These competencies are not only pertinent to our current public health courses but also hold significant relevance for our futures as public health professionals. We encountered a distinct challenge necessitating adept time management, particularly in synchronizing our schedules with that of our MCHB representative. This provided us with an invaluable opportunity to emulate the responsibilities of genuine public health professionals, honing our ability to manage commitments with external organizations effectively—a rare opportunity within academic settings. Our engagement allowed us to gain firsthand insights into the lives of vulnerable populations grappling with food insecurity in Edmonton. Throughout our coursework, the expectation is to devise interventions and solutions that benefit society as a whole. While achieving consensus among stakeholders can be daunting, witnessing the impact of organizations like the MCHB on newcomers to Canada provided us with tangible examples of qualities worth integrating into our own public health practice.

Although we learned how to develop a logic model and theory of change as part of an evaluation for an already existing program, it is something I can see myself using to develop community programs in the future.