Enhancing Inclusive Mentorship: Valuing Diversity and Ensuring Accessibility and Belonging for Newcomers and Children of Newcomers to Become Health Equity Researchers

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PROJECT SUMMARY A critical component of impactful health equity research is involving and mentoring academic and community researchers from diverse backgrounds, particularly those with lived experience related to the structural inequities and health disparities we aim to eliminate. The proposed DEIA Mentorship Supplement builds on our parent study that tests the effectiveness of three nested levels of intervention to reduce disparate adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (psychological distress, daily stressors, and economic precarity) and increase protective factors (social support, critical awareness of/access to resources, English proficiency, cultural connectedness, and mental health service use) among Latinx and Black immigrants and refugees. Our community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach emphasizes collaborative knowledge generation, which ensures our research is rigorous, innovative, responsive, and equity-focused. Resources to expand and create a mentorship structure that builds on the strengths of bilingual newcomers and children of newcomers who want to become biomedical and social science health researchers will advance our research impact. We propose an anti-oppressive, co-learning, multi-tiered mentoring model that we will assess, sustain, and disseminate. Our outstanding team includes co-mentors involved in the parent study and a group of extremely promising mentees at multiple levels who want to become health equity researchers. An important innovation is our inclusion of not only graduate students but also project staff and community partner mentees who want to enter graduate and/or medical school, but who have not had the opportunity to pursue a typical professional trajectory because of needing to work to support themselves and their families and other issues related to newcomer experiences. The supplement would advance our research and mentoring activities (and health equity research more broadly) through three aims: 1) formalize and implement anti-oppressive, team-based, co-learning mentoring processes for student, staff, and community mentees to engage in structured research mentorship, career path mentoring, and wellness support; 2) leverage the parent study quantitative and qualitative data to conduct mentee-led mixed methods analyses of emerging research questions not related to intervention impacts; and 3) improve dissemination of parent study and proposed supplement research findings through additional peer-reviewed manuscripts, innovative bilingual multimedia materials for community partners and members, and team conference presentations to maximize impact. One of the strengths of the mentee team who have lived experiences as newcomers or children of newcomers is that they have innovative and culturally grounded ideas for asking research questions that are most relevant to their communities and disseminating the results in novel, bilingual formats that are usable and accessible to their communities. In sum, the proposed research and mentoring plan will provide critical opportunities for enhancing the impact of the parent grant and advancing our research.