Preventable Differences: Exploring Public Health Careers with Black and Latino Youth

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Project Summary / Abstract The overarching goal of this project is to create exhibits and programs that educate broad audiences, especially Black and Latino adolescents and young adults, about public health careers and their role in alleviating the inequitable health outcomes that Black and Latino communities suffer from. We will use the COVID-19 pandemic as the content focus for these exhibits and programs. Key learning outcomes will include: 1. COVID-19 and other health challenges have had a disproportionate impact on Black and Latino people, for a variety of interconnected reasons; 2. Minimizing this disproportionate impact will require creating locally-tailored, culturally-responsive public health interventions and engaging community-level public health experts to recruit and support public participation; 3. There are many health- and medicine-focused career pathways that young people can pursue that can help them contribute to the goal of better protecting vulnerable communities from future epidemics and pandemics. The specific aims of this five-year proposed project are to: 1. Project Years 1-2: Engage public health experts and community members from Queens, NY in a range of public events to build trust, gather input, track the latest emerging scientific knowledge COVID-19 and effective tracing, diagnosis and treatment; and guide the design and development of exhibits and workshops that address project goals. 2. Project Year 3: Fabricate five exhibit pieces and create a career exploration workshop series that address these goals, pilot them at the New York Hall of Science, evaluate their impact and revise as needed. 3. Project Year 4: Pilot the exhibit pieces and workshop series at a peer science center in Oakland, CA, evaluate their impact and revise as needed. 4. Project year 5: Produce final versions of the exhibit pieces for the New York Hall of Science; disseminate exhibit plans for use at other museum sites; disseminate workshop formats for use at other museum sites; disseminate evaluation findings. The project will use formative testing and prototyping to inform the design and development of educational resources. The project evaluation will use culturally-responsive, rigorous methods to both monitor project progress and quality and to test the impact of project deliverables on participants and public audiences.