UNMC College of Public Health to hold April 24 open house in North Omaha

The Center for Reducing Health Disparities in the University of Nebraska Medical Center College of Public Health will showcase its new North Omaha office space at a public open house Wednesday, April 24, from 3-5 p.m.
 
Community partners and UNMC colleagues are invited to the open house, hosted by Keyonna King, Dr.PH., assistant professor, health promotion, and Kenya Love, community health program manager, Center for Reducing Health Disparities.
 
The new offices are located in the Wurdeman Learning Center on the Omaha Home for Boys Campus, 5190 Sprague Plaza, on the lower level of the east wing.
 
The new offices provide more space to hold larger community meetings, workshops, programs, research and other events. They recently moved from the Fontenelle Clinic at 5050 Ames Ave.
 
"We are excited to open our new space to the community and our colleagues on campus," Dr. King said. "To address health disparities, it is important to be visible in the community and be on the ground working in partnership with our community.
 
"North Omaha is my home and I'm also a researcher, so I strive to ensure that we are building and maintaining partnerships with our community that work toward making an impact to advance health while also moving science forward."
 
As the program manager, Love's focus is to improve population health for the underserved population in North Omaha.
 
"Social action needs more research, and research needs more social action," Love said. "The Center for Reducing Health Disparities directly creates a positive partnership between UNMC and the community to serve and cultivate such a purpose to reduce health disparities."
 
In partnership with the community, Love will seek to bring about positive change and impact through research, planning, implementation and evaluation of community and culturally-responsive programs.
 
She manages and facilitates community groups to assess health from multiple lenses, including need and impact, evidence, and dissemination.
 
The culmination of these activities is used to inform and design programs and content for materials to share progress, get input, and/or facilitate necessary conversations to further advance the health of African Americans who reside in North Omaha.
 
Dr. King's research focuses on using the community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach and other community engagement principles to partner with the North Omaha community to develop, implement and evaluate research projects and programs that address health disparities in the African American population.
 
Dr. King also has worked with other communities of color and has collaborated on various projects that address disparities in the Latino and Native American populations.
 
The crux of Dr. King's research is community partnership to develop studies and projects that create community buy-in, ownership and more sustained outcomes of the work that is completed.
 
Dr. King also teaches the CBPR course to doctoral students every fall providing them with hands-on experience working with a community organization to address real world issues.
 
We are Nebraska Medicine and UNMC. Our mission is to lead the world in transforming lives to create a healthy future for all individuals and communities through premier educational programs, innovative research and extraordinary patient care.
 
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