First published on October 20, 2014 in observance of the COPH’s 30^th anniversary celebration.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

Like many entities directed at the greater public good, the USF College of Public Health’s Harrell Center was the product of a private philanthropist’s gift. James Harrell and his family wanted to do something to help eliminate family violence, and they acted on that desire. The result was a 1997 endowment that set the stage for what has become an international force.

“The intent of the Harrell family was to provide a center that would focus on family violence,” affirmed Dr. Martha Coulter, the center’s founding director, “but they were particularly interested in looking at the prevention of family violence, as well as research that would be directly applicable to prevention and intervention.

“So the mission of the Harrell Center, really, is to be an intermediary between research and practice, to do research that is focused on family violence intervention and prevention across the lifespan.

“The grant was an endowment, so the funding is very limited, because it’s just the interest on the endowment. Now, most of the income is from other grants and contracts,” Coulter said, “but what the Harrell endowment did was provide the base for doing that kind of research.”

Brick sponsored by the Harrell Center in remembrance of James Harrell after his death in 2007.

One of three faculty members at the center full-time, Coulter, whose doctorate is in maternal and child health, teaches three courses: Family and Community Violence, Child Maltreatment, and Child Health, in addition to coordinating the maternal and child health academic concentration at COPH.

“In the very beginning, there was only the grant and the establishment of the center conceptually,” she said. “Over the years, we’ve developed.”

That development recently necessitated alignment into three divisions.

“The specific divisions – the redesigning of the organizational chart – has really been something that I’ve done this year,” Coulter said. “Before that, over the years, we’ve just developed these different projects and all worked together, but it looked like now we were at a place where we really needed to have a little bit more separate organization and to develop some strategic goals and objectives in each of those content areas.”

The result is a children’s services division directed by Dr. Lianne Estefan, an intimate partner violence division directed by Coulter, and an elder mistreatment division directed by Dr. Carla Vandeweerd. Dr. Karen Liller recently joined the center as a regular collaborator focusing her attention on the overlap between child maltreatment and unintentional injury, Coulter said, and “usually about 10” graduate students round out her staff. A community advisory board is among the center’s numerous external extensions.

“The children’s section has been very involved in looking at issues regarding the prevention of violence in the community,” Coulter explained, “and the center has developed a virtual research institute with one of the community agencies, Champions for Children, which is a multi-program unit, so that we can do research that is truly collaborative. We’ve worked very consistently with them over the years.”

Graphic that Harrell Center graduate assistant Natasha Hojati created for the Center’s Facebook page.

Coulter said that much of what her intimate partner violence section does involves the courts, so much so that she has become a regular consultant for the courts and has undertaken the task of evaluating the effectiveness of their intervention programs for batterers. Developing and continually improving guidelines for batterer intervention and responses to the needs of victims have been major off-shoot projects.

Among the section’s more significant research findings is that female batterers are falling through the cracks. While the county’s intervention for male batterers has been “very effective,” Coulter said, it has largely failed to successfully intervene with female batterers, who comprise about 15 percent of all convicted batterers in Hillsborough County.

“The clinical providers of these programs,” she said, “have been saying for a long time that they didn’t think the state-mandated curriculum for men was really the right curriculum to use for women.”

Among many leaders and dignitaries who have visited the Harrell Center over the years was then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who attended an elder abuse conference sponsored by the Center in 2001. The attorney general is pictured above with students Seraphine Pitt (left) and Carol Williams, and below with Dr. Coulter.

The elder mistreatment division concentrates on elders with dementia and the kinds of violence against them, which is, Coulter said, “fairly common, unfortunately, from both spousal caretakers and children taking care of elderly parents. The dynamics of this are very different from other sorts of domestic violence and really have a lot to do with people not understanding how to help people who have dementia.”

Coulter said she considers a new project in the division to be particularly tantalizing and potentially groundbreaking.

Called the Senior Surfers Project, Coulter said it looks at the rapidly expanding but little-known phenomenon of women over 50 seeking relationships online and getting responses from people who wind up physically, emotionally or financially harming them.

All previous research on Internet connections leading to violent encounters has been on adolescents, she said, so Senior Surfers is another project aiming to keep potentially overlooked victims out of the cracks – in this case, the cracks that open at the nexus of society and technology.

Dr. Coulter chats with Judge Dennis Alvarez (left) and James Harrell at a 1997 function.

With so much involvement in the local community, including working closely with the Spring and, until its recent demise thanks to funding shortfalls, the Family Justice Center, the Harrell Center’s global impact might be surprising to some, but global involvement has proven beneficial on numerous fronts.

Dr. Pnina S. Klein, a clinical and developmental psychologist and professor of education at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, recently led a Mediational Intervention for Sensitizing Caregivers workshop on campus to promote cognitive functioning and attachment by improving parent-caregiver interactions with infants and young children.

Attendees included community professionals, physicians and COPH students, faculty and staff.  Dr. Robert Nelson, a joint professor in COPH and the Morsani College of Medicine, sponsored attendance by a visiting group of physicians and clinicians from Ecuador.

“It’s been used all over the world,” Coulter said of MISC. “The outcomes internationally of this program have shown that it’s very effective in strengthening attachment and reducing child maltreatment, so we brought Dr. Klein here from Israel this year to do a training for community people and staff here, as well as faculty and students.”

Dr. Martha Coulter, Harrell Center founding director (right in both photos), in Ecuador in 2007.

Elsewhere on the international front, Coulter is working with the medical school in Panama to begin collecting information and developing guidelines for Panamanian health providers to improve their responses to intimate partner violence. She’s also working in Quito, Ecuador, to develop a program that will provide fundamental intervention services for indigenous populations.

Children in a remote Himalayan village in India read books sent to them by the Harrell Center.

Coulter went to India in 2012 with a group that collected data on maternal/child health and family violence among the 26 indigenous tribes in the Himalayas as a response to one tribal leader’s interest in addressing those issues. Progress has been slow, she said, because the tribes are not formally centralized in any way, and the terrain is difficult and isolating. The center recently collected books to send to children there. A librarian navigates dirt paths on a bicycle to deliver them.

Not surprisingly, Coulter’s five-year vision for the Harrell Center is about more expansion, mostly ideological, and lots of it.

“I would like to expand our depth in looking at female offenders and the way the courts respond to them,” she said.

“We’ve applied for some grants to look with a lot more depth at issues related to fathers. This is an area that has been somewhat neglected and needs a lot of attention. What are the ways that we can help fathers from the very beginning develop the kinds of skills that will be more nurturing and less likely to produce problems?

“As far as the center itself,” she said, “I think the area that we really need to expand the most is our capacity for doing community training and education and technical assistance.”

“I’d also like to see us focus on more primary intervention in a public health direction.   A lot of what we’ve done has been secondary response intervention, but I would like to see us working with primary situations – families, parent-child relationships.”

Coulter said an example of the center’s involvement in this area is its participation in the Hillsborough County Violence Prevention Collaborative, a plan for reducing violence throughout the county.

Community events also make Coulter’s expansion list. Recent ones have included fundraisers with artists and bands, and even a biker run.

“I would like to see us expand these community events, because they have been very helpful. The center doesn’t have much funding,” she said, “and the funding that we get is almost always research funding, so if we want to do things that are outside the research arena, we have to raise the money ourselves.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health. Photos courtesy of Dr. Martha Coulter, Eric Younghans, Dr. Robert Nelson, USF Health and the Harrell Center.

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His practice is global health. His passion is preventing mortality from infectious diseases.

Dr. Sharad Malavade joins a growing list of USF College of Public Health alumni recognized for their exceptional service and dedication to public health. He was one of two alumni honored this year with a COPH Outstanding Alumni Award, presented at the COPH on April 4 as part of a week-long national celebration of public health.

From left: Tom Unnasch, PhD, Sharad Malavade, MBBS, DNB, MPH, PhD and Donna Petersen, ScD, MSH, CPH. (Photo by Torie Doll)

Outstanding alumni are chosen based on the contributions they’ve made to public health in the areas of leadership, research, teaching (scholarship and mentorship to health professionals) and the impact they’ve made on their community and society at large. They are nominated by present and former professors, supervisors and colleagues. To date, 33 alumni have received the award.

“I was like a caterpillar when I entered the COPH,” said Malavade in his award-acceptance speech. “And when I left, I had emerged as something much more impressive.”

Malavade’s interest in public health began in India, where he was raised. He received his medical training at the University of Mumbai and worked in the country’s rural areas as an ophthalmologist.

“That work left a lasting impression on me,” said Malavade. “I saw a child die of malaria and a woman die of typhoid. These were avoidable deaths. We have all the antibiotics we need to fight these infections, but the people I saw needed better and earlier access to care.”

Dr. Malavade performing eye exam in India. (Photo courtesy of Malavade)

It was this “wasteful loss of life” that inspired Malavade to train as a public health specialist in global health communicable diseases.

Malavade graduated from the USF COPH in 2010, receiving his MPH in global health. He followed up with his doctorate in 2015. In his years at USF he worked as a teaching assistant, graduate research assistant and instructor. He studied the re-emergence of measles in Ecuador, examined risk factors for the transmission of helminths (parasitic worms) in Central America and the use of urea as a sanitizing agent in solar toilets in El Salvador. He took part in the Peer Mentor program, was a volunteer with the annual COPH flu shot drive and even served as president of the USF Badminton Club.

“Sharad was one of the most capable, intelligent and imaginative students I have encountered during my 30 years as a principal investigator,” wrote Dr. Thomas Unnasch, global health department chair and a distinguished USF Health professor, in recommending Malavade for the award.

“My time at the COPH was one of the most professionally and personally enriching periods of my life,” added Malavade, who is now a third-year resident in internal medicine and chief resident of research at Brandon Regional Hospital in Brandon, Fla. “It was formative to my professional development, and the exposure I had was unparalleled in terms of the education and research experience I gained.”

It’s that zeal for research that allowed Malavade to create a name for himself at USF–and beyond.

Dr. Malavade at his USF COPH graduation. (Photo courtesy of Malavade)

In addition to taking care of patients in and out of the hospital, Malavade, in his role as chief resident of research, spends much of his time training other residents in how to conduct high-level scientific studies. He organizes a monthly lecture series for residents on how to come up with a research hypothesis, do a literature search, design a study and interpret the results. “Patients trust us to read studies and make the appropriate recommendations,” he commented. “If we accept flawed studies, then we are doing patients a disservice.”

To highlight the research of his fellow residents, last year Malavade organized Brandon Regional’s first-ever Resident Research Day, fashioned after the annual USF Health Research Day. Forty residents participated and 25 posters were presented.

“The only reason I could carry this out was because I was trained at USF in how to initiate and plan a study and then present its results. When you can better educate the professional, then the better care a professional can give. And that impacts public health.”

In July Malavade, who plans a career as a physician/researcher, will begin a fellowship in infectious diseases at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. “I want to continue doing meaningful research that can bring down the prevalence of infectious diseases and possibly even eliminate them on a global scale. I want to continue doing the research which I was trained for at USF.”

Alumni Fast Five
What did you dream of becoming when you were younger?
A physician

Where could we find you on the weekend?
Spending time with my family. (Malavade and his wife, USF COPH doctoral student Malinee Neelamegam, recently welcomed their first child, a baby boy, to the family.)

What was the last book you read?
“Grieving Dads,” by Kelly Farley

What superpower would you like to have?
To clone myself and multitask

What was your all-time favorite movie?
“Shawshank Redemption”

Related media:
Healthy Bites

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health

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USF College of Public Health MPH student Candice Whitely became increasingly aware of the discipline of public health while working with Doctors without Borders in South Sudan as a nurse practitioner.

“We were treating a malaria epidemic and I learned first-hand the importance of disease monitoring and surveillance, as it is the trigger point for the development of health intervention,” Whitely said.

Holding a MSN and BSN from Columbia University’s school of nursing and a BA from Palm Beach Atlantic University, Whitely understood that public health is part of the job as a nurse practitioner and enrolled in the COPH’s online MPH program to study epidemiology and biostatistics.

“I selected USF after reviewing the online MPH school options,” Whitely said. “I wanted to have the flexibility of an online program but also academic rigor, USF’s MPH program provides both.”

Working on her MPH degree, Whitely is also the director of operations for Sewing New Futures.

Candice Whitely, BSN, MSN, at a fundraiser in Pensacola, Fla. for Sewing New Futures (Photo courtesy of Whitely).

Sewing New Futures is a non-profit social enterprise that empowers survivors and girls at risk of sex-trafficking through career training, education, medical care, and social services.

At their center in Najafgarh on the outskirts of New Delhi, they work with a scheduled caste community that has traditionally engaged in prostitution. In India alone, 1.2 million children are forced and trafficked into prostitution every year. In the surrounding area to their center there are more than 30,000 women and girls at risk to this exploitation and over 5,000 already engaged in the sex trade.

Their aim is to give women a choice to break this cycle of intergenerational of prostitution with education, paid vocational training programs and employment either with Sewing New Futures or elsewhere.

“I wear many hats from management to programming. My role varies daily but often includes quality checking sewn pieces, conducting health camps, and developing monitoring program for our organization,” she said. “I also have to spend at least 10-20 minutes of every day dancing to Bollywood classics after lunch as part of our health promotion through exercise program.”

Her involvement started out slowly, beginning with fundraising and to eventually turning the center into a non-profit. She now lives between the between India and Florida.

Whitely said she loves the way they promote from within. The center’s seamstress and sewing room manager is a woman who joined their program in 2014.

“She was seeking an opportunity apart from prostitution. She is one of our biggest success stories,” she said. “Through our funding, she has completed one year of seamstress training and now runs a boutique out of the center, stitching and selling Indian garments for the local community. Through working for us she independently provides for her seven-year-old son and herself.”

Candice Whitely talking with a classroom about Sewing New Futures (Photo courtesy of Whitely).

Whitely said she has many great memories from her time working with Sewing New Futures.

“My favorite times at work are when we come together as a team and accomplish our tasks. For example, on days when we have a large order from our sewing center and we all get down and dirty with a needle and thread to complete the stitching,” she said. “At the end of the day we are offering an alternative employment to women and adolescents who would be forced to prostitute if our center did not exist. Having the chance to work alongside them and to reach their goals is a dynamic experience.”

Applying what she has learned during her time at the COPH, Whitely is currently developing a program to improve health outcomes for the women and children in their target area.

“Though there is medical care readily available, most women in our target population are not accessing it as they utilizing alternative care through traditional healers. My approach to the development of this program is definitely influenced by what I have learned so far at USF,” Whitely said. “Simply creating a program is not adequate; needs assessment, policy development, and then assurance is integral to the success of a public health intervention. Based on this, we are in the data collection and research phase…more to come!”

After completing her MPH, Whitely said she wants to work towards her PhD in public health.  As an adjunct nurse practitioner professor she also plans to continue practicing and teaching in that field as well.

If anyone from USF is interested in getting involved with Sewing New Futures please contact Candice Whitely at sewingnewfuturesindia@gmail.com or connect with them on Facebook.

Story by Caitlin Keough, USF College of Public Health

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In Florida to run the Disney Marathon in January, USF College of Public Health MPH graduate Kimberly Rogers decided to reconnect with familiar faces and old haunts in Tampa while she had the chance.  She connected with Natalie Preston-Washington at COPH and wound up accepting an invitation to be the first speaker in the “Healthy Bites” lunch and learn series.

“I just said, ‘I’d like to come by the college to say hi to folks,’ and it led to this,” said Rogers with a smile.

The ebullient Rogers leapt right in, glad to share her experiences and advice with public health students who are where she was only a few years ago.

After completing her master of public health (global health practice with concentration in maternal and child health) in 2008, Rogers went directly into the CDC’s Public Health Associate program, then a three-year paid fellowship (now two).  The program gave her, she said, “boots-on-the-ground public health experience.”

“If you want to be a leader in public health, to see first-hand what goes on on the ground is imperative,” she said.

Her first post-graduate locale provided an easy transition from COPH to the CDC fellowship.

“I lucked out and got to stay in Tampa and work at the Hillsborough County Health Department downtown,” she said.

Her first year was spent in HIV and STDs, which provided an early test of intestinal fortitude while her very grounded boots walked a wild gamut of human paths.

“You want to talk about something that gets you out of your comfort zone?  Go to people’s houses, and always to deliver bad news.  You’re never there for good news,” Rogers said.

But seeing “the humanity of it all,” she said, was a life experience she treasures.

“STDs, like a lot of other diseases, know no sex, they know no socio-economic status, they know no age, they know no income, no race.  I was regularly going from the worst parts of Tampa to Bayshore Boulevard and knocking on gated homes in gated communities in the same day.”

Her second year was devoted to tuberculosis, a boon to her present work in Alaska, which has the highest TB rate of any state in the union.

The final year of her fellowship, a stint with the health department’s epidemiology division, rounded her knowledge.

Fellowship complete, it was serious career time for Rogers, and sticking with the CDC was a natural choice.  But what exactly to do, and where?

She never thought she would consider living in Alaska, she said with the same energetic spirit that regularly rings through her rhetoric, but remembering an unexpected high from a COPH India field experience made her consider the position there that has been her professional lifeblood since 2011.

“That was just crazy,” she said of first even considering Alaska.  “I saw it and laughed – not at the job, but at the location.  I applied for some other jobs, turned some down and thought I was crazy for doing so.  But then I talked with my current boss on the phone for 10 minutes, and I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do.”

COPH grad Kimberly Rogers, MPH, is all smiles (and a little bit of ice) after a long training run. She volunteers as a mentor coach with the Washington-Alaska Chapter of Team in Training, which is the endurance training program of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

“This” was moving the 5,000 miles from Tampa to Anchorage to take a position as a quarantine public health officer at the CDC Anchorage Quarantine Station, one of 20 quarantine stations in the U.S.  Her role, she said, is to “prevent or mitigate the introduction of infectious diseases into the United States.”  The work focuses on responding to health threats related to travel by air, land or sea.

In that capacity, she develops preparedness exercises, conducts multiagency partner training and leads surveillance projects.  No day is ever the same at the Quarantine Station, she said, and the dynamic work environment and “great working relationships” with partners in the public health and port communities of Alaska have kept her there, happily, for the past three-plus years.

Outside of work, Rogers serves as an executive board member of the Alaska Public Health Association and mentors aspiring marathoners in their running and fundraising efforts as part of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training.  The Disney Marathon she was in town to run in January was her fifth marathon overall.

Five years before her move to the “Last Frontier,” Rogers’ immediate leap into graduate studies had engaged a shift, she said, from her bachelor’s degree in “the hard sciences” – namely biology and chemistry – to the social sciences.  But more, it proved to be a humbling experience that presented an unanticipated challenge.

“Oh, I loved it, but I think there is good and bad about going straight from undergrad to grad school,” she said.  “The good is that you still have that energy and that zest to get through, and you’re in that groove with the school.

“The bad is that you’re surrounded by people who have an amazing amount of work experience – international students who have medical degrees from other countries who are bringing that experience to a global health program – and you’re a 22-year-old kid who’s just finished with her bachelor’s degree and setting foot here trying to figure out what the heck to do.

“That was a challenge, and it was a humbling one.  But it also was an opportunity really to delve into it further, because I didn’t want to disappoint my peers.  I wanted to be on their level and to engage with them in the appropriate way and to learn from them.”

Her COPH experiences added to the mix, as she gained valuable leadership experience by serving as co-president of the USF Public Health Student Association, where she coordinated the annual COPH flu shot drive and numerous other service and social functions with her peers.

Her last year at the college  culminated with “an amazing field experience” in Mumbai, India.  In no small part influenced by memories of her undergraduate roommate’s tales, she leapt at the chance to spend two months working with a nonprofit that helps the children of migrant construction workers.

“Globally mobile populations,” she calls them.  “People who are going from one place to the next, who can’t set up health care, can’t even set up to go to school.”

Perhaps unlike any other, the organization known as Mumbai Mobile Crèches actually moves with the people it serves.  Faced with choosing between an IFE in Panama that would essentially have been mapped out for her and the daunting unknown of an adventure in India, Rogers chose the latter.

Rogers collecting immunization data at one of the “balwadis,” or child care centers, in Mumbai, India.

Spending a weekend volunteering at a Pulse Polio Clinic in Mumbai.

She had to set it up herself in the midst of a whirling funnel cloud of question marks.  No one in her class had gone to India.  She was committing to two months and realized she had no idea what she was getting herself into.  The college had approved the project, but basics like living arrangements were up in the air.  What little she knew wasn’t exactly what she was used to:  She would share a 500-square-foot flat with four other people during the monsoon season.

“While I was on the plane,” she recalled, “I was thinking, ‘I think I made a horrible decision.  Oh, my god, I have totally screwed up.”

But the reality that greeted her, challenging as it was, lit her public health fire so hot not even trudging through water up to her knees – which she did plenty of but now laughs about – could extinguish it.  It was, she said, the warmth and kindness of the people she served that stoked that fire.

“To see the heart of these people makes you want to do everything you possibly can to help them,” she said.  “You think, ‘Why are these people in this position?  This is what I’m here to do.  Let me try to give this population the things that I didn’t have to work to get.  I didn’t have to work to get clean drinking water, so why do they?  What can we do to change that?”

Then a junior at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, she credits UNC for spurring her to “shift pretty late in the game to public health,” flipping her public health switch on by revealing its essence.

Rogers had just transferred to UNC from Chipola College in Marianna, Fla.  A native of Springhill, La., a town of slightly more than 5,000 that abuts the Arkansas state line, she had grown up in Blountstown, Fla., where she was one of 78 in her high school graduating class.

“Chipola College was amazing.  It provided me with a lot of opportunities, but then transferring to North Carolina was just mind-blowing.  Everybody needs an experience of being a small fish in a big pond, and that was my experience, because it had been the other way around the entire way there.”

She had never met international students before, she said, and it was another experience that flipped on her public health switch.

“I don’t think I really understood what public health was until I was 20 years old.  I had a pretty sheltered life until then,” she said. “For the first time learning about people’s journeys, joining those organizations, meeting those international students and hearing their stories just made me realize health from a whole new perspective.  It’s not a physician telling someone what to do.  It’s a broader perspective.  It’s managing health disparities, for example.”

She simply had not, she said, “really opened up the world” until global health showed it to her and begged her to look inside.

“I had a roommate who was from India, grew up there,” she remembered, “and regaled me with tales of seeing one side of town that was cosmopolitan – you would not differentiate it from New York – and the other side of the street that was a slum.  And we have that here in the United States.  We have that here in Tampa, just on a smaller scale.

“Those situations just brought in a worldwide perspective that put me in a place where I thought, ‘Instead of writing a prescription for one person, why can’t I help with a hundred vaccines for an entire village or help increase the water supply?’  That’s public health, and it wasn’t until then that I learned that.”

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

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The Maternal and Child Health Student Organization at the USF College of Public Health is backing a women’s health issues teleconference sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The teleconference will be held at the Marshall Student Center on Oct. 22 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

MPH students Christina Sudduth and Jessica Gipson, who in May wrapped up a year as MCHSO president, are working behind the scenes for its success.

“Most of the work is really just getting the word out about the event,” Sudduth said. “We have the speakers and panelists confirmed. The Maternal and Child Health Organization, which Jessica represents, has been a partner in that, and some other student organizations have been getting the word out.”

“One of the reasons why I was so eager to assist Christina in this,” Gipson said, “is that she and I both, on separate occasions, had the opportunity to go to Panama with a course through USF that really opened up my eyes to what goes on outside of the U.S., the things that women deal with on a daily basis living in developing countries.”

The course was an online offering based at COPH that included a week in Panama at its conclusion. While in Panama, students met with local public health agencies and gave presentations of the research they had conducted during the semester.

“What’s really great about that course and how it ties in with this event is that it focuses on women’s health in a broad spectrum approach,” Gipson said, “as issues of violence and aging and economic equality all play roles in women’s health. It really takes a human rights perspective of health, so I hope this event continues that.”

Gipson said other international travel made a similar impression on her and provided further impetus to get involved with promoting the event.

“I also went to India,” she said, “so this was a really big opportunity for me, because not everyone has that same opportunity to go outside of the country and see what’s going on. So, bringing women in from other countries who are at higher-level policy positions like this to spread awareness and give light to what happens was important for me to share with the university and the community.”

The MCHSO is also touting an annual U.N. practicum and encouraging USF students to apply for attendance to the March 2015 event.

“Each year, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom holds a United Nations practicum for students throughout the States to go to the Commission on the Status of Women meetings in New York at the U.N. headquarters,” Sudduth said. “This is in advance of accepting applications for the 2015 practicum. So it’s getting the word out about that opportunity but also about the work that the organization does on a day-to-day basis.”

The practicum features a different focus each year, Sudduth said, adding that she participated the 2013 practicum on millennium development goals.

“The Commission on the Status of Women works with NGOs and international governments to hone in on women’s and girls’ rights within international policy and goals,” she said. “Last year, it was about what kinds of lines and policies we, as the community of professionals, would like to see in the post-development goals as they relate to women’s and girls’ health, well-being and rights.

“This year, it’s based on the 20^th anniversary of the Beijing plan of action, which set a precedent for the types of goals that international organizations would like to work toward as far as women’s rights and women’s health on a global scale.”

While the U.N. practicum has a specific focus, Sudduth said, it stays within the realm of women’s peace and security, and the WILPF as a whole concentrates its year-round attention on women’s safety and rights within times of conflict.

Sudduth said that Dr. Ellen Daly, professor in the Department of Community and Family Health, and Dr. Cheryl Vamos, assistant professor in the department, have been leaders in supporting the cause and helping to spread awareness of the event through the Center for Transdisciplinary Research for Women’s Health, which functions within CFH.

 Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.

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In April, the Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence announced a book drive for children in the Himalayas.  The initiative was in collaboration with RIWATCH, the Research Institute of World’s Ancient Traditions Cultures and Heritage, to promote reading for children in rural areas.  The month-long drive resulted in the collection of four boxes of soft-covered, light-weight books for children and adolescents.

USF public health and social work students traveled to Roing, India, and delivered the reading materials via bicycle.

“The children in India were happy to receive new reading materials,” said Natasha Hojati, a student assistant with the Harrell Center.  “A big thanks is sent out to all the involved parties that made this possible.”

Based in the USF College of Public Health Department of Community and Family Health, the mission of The Harrell Center is to develop and integrate knowledge with best practices to strengthen community responses to family violence.  In essence, they seek to end family violence by understanding it.

Jessica Gipson, a public health graduate student and president of the Maternal and Child Health Student Organization, presented a book donation to librarian Sathyanarayanan Mundayoor in Roing, India.

Jessica Gipson and librarian Sathyanarayanan Mundayoo with beneficiaries of the book drive in India.

Story and photos courtesy of Natasha Hojati, The Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence

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The Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence is collecting books for children in the Himalayans.  In collaboration with the Research Institute of World’s Ancient Traditions Cultures and Heritage (RIWATCH), this effort promotes reading for children in rural areas.

A community initiative program, RIWATCH organized “Joy of Reading” workshops to promote good reading habits among children of different schools in and around Roing, Lower Dibang Valley, India.

“We seek soft-covered books that are in good condition for children and adolescents,” said Martha Coulter, DrPH, MSW, professor and director of The Harrell Center.  “These donations will be delivered by bicycle, which is why we ask specifically for soft covered books that are light weight. “

The Harrell Center is partnering with Vijay Swami, a librarian based in India, to deliver the books. He seeks recreational reading materials and educational books.

“With all of your support, the library movement will reach at the door level of every child, so that they can become better humans in the world,” Swami said. “We appreciate your efforts.”

Collection boxes are conveniently located in the Colleges of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine, as well as the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center, School of Physical Therapy & Rehabilitation Sciences, Shimberg Health Sciences Library, USF Health Faculty Office Building, and The WELL.  Donations can also be mailed to The Harrell Center, 13201 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., MDC 56, Tampa, FL 33612-3807.

Book donations are accepted through the last week in April. For additional information contact The Harrell Center’s director Dr. Coulter at mcoulter@health.usf.edu or student assistant Natasha Hojati at nhojati@health.usf.edu.

The mission of The Harrell Center is to develop and integrate knowledge with best practices to strengthen community responses to family violence. In essence, they seek to end family violence by understanding it.

The Department of Community and Family Health in the USF College of Public Health is the academic home for The Harrell Center.  The department offers more than 10 concentrations that lead to MPH, MSPH, DrPH, and PhD degrees, as well as dual degrees, special programs, and graduate certificates.

Written by Natasha Hojati, The Harrell Center for the Study of Family Violence

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