Dr. Nicole Nicotera, Associate Professor
Graduate School of Social Work

The proposed project is a collaborative effort between my existing partnership with the Bridge Project (http://www.du.edu/bridgeproject/) and a new community partner, Art from Ashes (AfA). AfA empowers struggling youth through poetry and other therapeutic workshops that facilitate expression, connection and transformation (www.artfromashes.org).  The project links two like-minded community partners and uses a quasi-experimental research design to test the efficacy of Art from Ashes workshops. Studies suggest that interventions like AfA workshops promote positive youth development and civic engagement. However, there is only anecdotal evidence that AfA programming fosters pro-social behaviors and AfA staff do not have the research capacity or funding to conduct an intervention research study.The proposed project is a win-win for both community partners, advances my engaged research agenda, and brings DU faculty research skills to a new community partnership.

Dr. Bonnie Clark, Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology

As a Public Good Fellow, I will build on my work at Amache, the site of Colorado's World War II era Japanese American internment camp.  The DU Amache project involves the first large-scale anthropological research performed by an academic institution at an internment camp site.   By addressing previously identified needs for the site and associated museum, the project provided needed expertise while at the same time creating a forum for training students in anthropology and community engaged scholarship.  The response to the project from the Japanese American community has been overwhelming positive.  The project also garnered media attention from print, radio, and television outlets.  Reactions from the discipline have also been very strong; invitations for conference presentations and publications about the Amache project started arriving before I went in the field.  This fellowship is geared to take advantage of the tremendous momentum of the Amache project to date, moving it forward in a way that expands its scope and ensures its future.  The three primary objectives of the project are designing and funding summer 2010 field research; expanding the community scope of the project; and disseminating results while building momentum for continued research.

Dr. Nancy Reichman, Chair of Sociology
Department of Sociology and Criminology, AHSS

As a public good fellow I will facilitate a community-based research network among University of Denver researchers and Colorado community organizations to conduct, catalogue, and disseminate research about the status of low-wage women in Colorado. The Research Network on the Status of Low-Wage Working Women in Colorado will engage in new research on the experiences of low-wage working women; synthesize and coordinate existing research; and bring research findings into broader community dialogue and discussion to promote workplace equity, access to quality and affordable health care and childcare, and policies that help women meet the dual demands of work and family.  The Research Network will be participatory, multi-dimensional, and action-oriented, built out of a collaborative process that involves faculty and students, grassroots activists and organizations, local policy think tanks, and wage earning women from Colorado.  Our data-rich research network will collect original data (interviews, surveys, ethnographies), conduct secondary analysis of existing databases, and will focus on several broad areas:

• Work and Employment
• Work and Family Integration
• Health and Safety
• Money and Finances
• Education and Training
• Retirement and Aging

The data we collect will be used by scholars interested in basic research about the lived experiences of low-wage workers and by community organizations that promote policies and programs that improve the status of working women in Colorado.

Dr. N. Eugene Walls, Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Social Work

Understanding the Complexity of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury among Sexual Minority Youth and Young Adults is a collaborative, community-based research project that will explore the mechanisms that motivate the relatively high prevalence rate of cutting and other self-injurious behavior among gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender youth and young adults. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the increased risks of self-injurious behavior for both sexual minority (Whitlock & Knox, 2007; Walls, Hancock, & Wisneski, 2007) and transgender youth (Walls, Laser, Nickels, & Wisneski, 2008) compared to rates documented among their heterosexual counterparts (Whitlock et al., 2006; Weierich & Nock, 2008). The existing scholarship, for example, suggests that between 12-21% of heterosexual youth engage in intentional self-injurious behavior, while the rates for the same behavior among sexual minority youth falls between 42-47%. Although research on self-injury among youth and young adults is only starting to emerge, the scholarship on these same behaviors among sexual minority youth and young adults is virtually non-existent. Give the prevalence and potential lethality of non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors, service providers and clinicians have little information on which to base their interventions.  This project seeks to address this critical gap in the literature.