Oregon Water Justice Framework: Community-Driven Principles and Priorities to Advance Water Justice

26 pagesSince Oregon’s founding, water resource decisions have created wealth for some and disparities for others — starting with broken treaties between the US government and sovereign tribal nations to exclusionary practices that relegated Black communities to areas prone to flooding or without access to potable water. There are workspaces and housing without proper access to water and sanitation that disproportionately impact low-income, rural, and migrant households. The cost of much-needed infrastructure upgrades is passed down through water bills, hitting customers struggling to cover basic expenses. And despite interest and desire, community members can’t easily access decision-making processes that dictate how we care for and sustain water for generations to come

How Ready Are Young Adults to Participate in Community Service? An Application of the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change

Purpose: Engaging in community service, or unpaid work intended to help people in a community, is generally associated with greater overall well-being. However, the process of beginning and maintaining community service engagement has been sparsely examined. The current study applied the Transtheoretical Model (TTM) of behavior change to understanding community service readiness among young adults. Design: Cross-sectional design using an online survey. Setting: Participants were undergraduate students recruited at a mid-sized Northeastern US university in Spring 2018. Sample: Participants (N = 314) had a mean age of 20.36 years (SD = 3.69), were primarily White (78%), female (72%), and from moderately high socioeconomic backgrounds (as measured by parental level of education). Measures: Socio-demographics including age, gender, race-ethnicity, and parental level of education; readiness, pros, cons, and self-efficacy for community service; civic engagement behavior; well-being. Analysis: Participants were classified into very low (n = 62), low (n = 59), moderate (n = 92), high (n = 46), and very high (n = 55) readiness for community service groupings. A MANOVA was conducted to assess relationships between groupings and community service TTM constructs, civic engagement, and well-being. Results: There were significant differences between readiness groupings on all main outcome variables, F(20, 1012) = 10.34, p \u3c.001; Wilks’ Λ = 0.54, η2 =.14. Post-hoc Games-Howell tests showed that those exhibiting higher levels of readiness reported fewer cons, greater pros, higher self-efficacy, more overall civic engagement, and greater well-being compared to lower readiness individuals. Conclusion: Consistent with previous TTM applications, self-efficacy and the importance of pros increased across readiness groupings while the importance of cons decreased. Study findings may be used to inform readiness-tailored interventional work for increasing community service. This area of study would benefit from longitudinal research examining community service readiness beyond the college environment

Oregon Water Futures Project Report: 2020-21 Community Engagement

106 pagesThe Oregon Water Futures Project is a collaboration between the University of Oregon, water and environmental justice interests, Indigenous peoples, communities of color, and low-income communities. Through a water justice lens, we aim to impact how the future of water in Oregon is imagined through storytelling, capacity building, relationship building, policymaking, and community-centered advocacy at the state and local level. In 2020, project partners co-conceptualized and facilitated a series of conversations with Native, Indigenous Latin American, Latinx, Black, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, Arab, and Somali communities, including webinars on Oregon water systems, phone interviews, and virtual online gatherings. These conversations lifted up culturally specific ways of interacting with drinking water and bodies of water; concerns around water quality and cost; resiliency in the face of challenges to access water resources essential for physical, emotional, and spiritual health; and a desire for water resource education and to be better equipped to advocate for water resources

Empathy, better patient care, and how interprofessional education can help

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been promoted as one way to prepare healthcare students for interprofessional encounters they might experience in the workplace. However, the link between IPE, interprofessional care in the workforce, and better patient outcomes is tenuous, perhaps in part due to the inability of IPE programs to adequately address barriers associated with interprofessional care (e.g., power differentials, role disputes). Empathy, or understanding the experiences of others, has emerged as a critical tool to breaking down barriers inherent to working in teams. Given the evidence connecting empathy to stronger team collaboration and better patient care, researchers significantly revamped programming from a prior training called Interprofessional Education for Complex Neurological Cases (IPE Neuro) to enhance empathy, foster stronger team collaboration, and improve information integration among participants. In this improved three-session program, participants from seven different professions were grouped into teams, assessed a patient volunteer with neurological disorder, and created and presented an integrated, patient-centric treatment plan. Students (N = 31) were asked to report general empathy levels, as well as attitudes, team skills, and readiness toward interprofessional care, before and after the program. We conducted paired samples t-tests and thematic analysis to analyze the data. Results showed that participants reported higher empathy levels, more positive attitudes, and greater team skills pre- to posttest with moderate to large effects. Results bolster IPE Neuro programming as one approach to prepare students for interprofessional care while underscoring the potential implications of IPE to improve empathy levels of healthcare professionals

Using the theory of planned behavior to assess willingness and attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccination among a predominantly white U.S. college sample

ABSTRACTObjective Through the lens of behavioral models such as the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the Health Belief Model, the present study (1) investigated U.S. university students’ willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and (2) examined predictors (e.g. demographics, past vaccine experience, TPB constructs) of vaccine willingness.Method University students (n = 170) completed a survey assessing demographics, health behaviors, attitudes, perceived severity/susceptibility, norms, and vaccine intentions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from April 2020 through July 2020.Results Overall, 56.5% of participants indicated that they would be willing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine once it is available, 39.4% were unsure of whether they would receive the vaccine, and 4.1% indicated they would not receive the vaccine. Multinomial logistic regression indicated that greater adherence to CDC guidelines (p = .030) and greater perceived pro-vaccine norms (p < .001) predicted greater vaccine willingness.Conclusions Results from this study are consistent with previous literature on vaccine hesitancy, whereby normative beliefs and adherence to CDC guidelines were found to be determinants of vaccine willingness. To reduce transmission of the COVID-19 pandemic, interventions aimed at promoting positive attitudes towards vaccination should aim to incorporate these observed determinants