 |
| Consilience for Community Development |
|
| In August of 2008, two graduate students at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health noticed a pattern in the solutions to historic public health issues: none were solved solely by professionals of that field. Any real world issue, public health or otherwise, requires collaboration across disciplines. While all fields have individual theories, perspectives, and equations that they use to study and address situations, integrating knowledge and perspectives across fields brings us closer to our goals of solving greater societal challenges. These two students concluded that their graduate studies would be the most beneficial if they incorporated this type of cross-discipline collaboration. Together they decided to build an interdisciplinary graduate group to facilitate this type of learning, and thus, Consilience for Community Development (CCD) was born.
Consilience, a term meaning “unity of knowledge,” is reflective of the group’s mission to bring together graduate students from a variety of professional fields, and capitalize on their different perspectives. Using this broad spectrum of expertise, the group sought to work on a real world issue to benefit their local community.
By January 2009, CCD and InStepp, Inc. formed a collaborative partnership. InStepp provided CCD with a golden opportunity to work on a project that would benefit the community and put all of their professional fields of study to use. CCD spent that semester working on several projects for InStepp, building their relationship with InStepp and strengthening group cohesion. The Fall 2009 semester was spent designing a series of Like Skills training workshops to be delivered to the clients of InStepp that were in line with InStepp’s mission, as well as that of CCD. These Life Skills Workshops (LESE) were developed based on the needs of the InStepp’s clients in conjunction with the skills available among CCD members.
Currently, CCD is delivering the completed workshops to InStepp clients bi-monthly. The five workshops include: Health and Wellness I, education on healthy nutrition and exercise management; Health and Wellness II, how to prevent health risks; Personal Financial Management, how to manage a personal budget; Social Interactions, how to successfully manage conflict in personal and professional relationships; and Access to Resources, a guide to public and free services in Durham.
CCD is providing InStepp with all materials necessary to host these workshops: powerpoints, instructor scripts, handouts, and any additional material. CCD is leading the first round of workshops, and will partner with InStepp staff to lead the following sessions. By creating this collaborative effort, CCD is providing InStepp with all the materials and expertise necessary to continue offering these important Life Skills Modules to their clients for years to come.
|