Previous Grant Recipients

Dr. Erin Wentzell has been awarded a Nashman Center Faculty Development grant with her partners Dr. Keith Cole and Dr. Jason Dring to address health with community partners to provide PT care to communities in the DC area. The GWPT program aims to create the structure to be an Engaged Department through intentionally developing, cultivating, and growing community partnerships to engage students, community members, and researchers in mutually beneficial projects. This initiative will aim to create year-round partnerships to provide students opportunities to engage with the DC community, develop their clinical skills, and engage in research data collection while providing meaningful events for the community partners based on their community needs.

Year of Award: 2022

Grant Amount: $1,000

Community Partner: Foggy Bottom West End Senior Villages, Special Olympics DC

Dr. Robert Orttung of the Elliott School of International Affairs and director of research for Sustainable GW has received a Nashman Center Faculty Development Grant to develop a DC Green Bank University Alliance. The DC Green Bank University Alliance will create a university alliance among GW, Georgetown, UDC, Howard, and Trinity, with two students representing each university, to provide input on projects to be funded by loans from the DC Green Bank. The students involved will work closely with the DC Green Bank to learn about the Bank’s work in the community and how that work can be made more effective with enhanced community input.

Year of Award: 2022

Grant Amount: $2,500

Community Partner: DC Green Bank

Dr. Sarah M. Ray, Assistant Professor of Human and Organizational Learning at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, has received a Nashman Center Faculty Development grant. Her research is focused on community-based adult education and social learning around women, femme, and non-binary collective social entrepreneurs. Dr. Ray is working with a community organization, Femme Fatale DC (FFDC). FFDC defines itself on the website https://www.femmefataledc.com/ as “grassroots retail” which is described as “ordinary people coming together in service of our extraordinary futures; creating the products, places and experiences we want to have in the world”. Dr. Ray is working in partnership with FFDC to advance research on social movement learning within organizational structures.

Year of Award: 2022

Grant Amount: $3,000

Community Partner: Femme Fatale DC

Drs. Cole, Dring, and Wentzell will use this grant to provide a service to the DC community by engaging student physical therapists (SPT) in screening activities designed to support the goals of the members of our community partner to age at home. SPTs, who require experiential learning opportunities, will conduct supervised mobility screenings, feeding back information to community members regarding their risk for falls and declines in mobility. The mobility screens will also include data collection using wearable technology to assess the ability of technology to aid early identification of increased falls risk and decline in mobility in older adults. Our community partners are seeking information about their own mobility and balance, and identification of those who are at increased risk for falls and decline in mobility. The goal is to keep our community members healthy, mobile, and engaged, and this partnership may facilitate earlier intervention and support for those identified who may require increased support to “age- in-place”.

Year of Award: 2022

Grant Amount: $4,000

Community Partner: Foggy Bottom West End Senior Villages

Dr. Michael Long, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health, received a faculty development grant to use Community Based Systems Dynamics (CBSD) work with the first cohort of the DC Youth Health Equity and Leadership (DC Youth HEAL). With a team from the School of Public Health, the program works to strengthen these 8-10 local high school students’ ability to engage as student leaders with the school behavioral health (SBH) interactive governance system in Washington, DC. The project co- developed quantitative systems dynamics model user interface, an on-line platform for sharing and analyzing data, that can be shared with system stakeholders so that they can interact with a youth-developed mental model of the school behavioral health system

Year of Award: 2021

Grant Amount: $5,000

Community Partner: DC Youth Health Equity and Leadership (DC Youth HEAL) 

Dr. Maranda Ward, an assistant professor at the George Washington University with a background in Sociology/Anthropology, Maternal and Child Health, as well as Education, is a recent winner of the Faculty Development Grant for Racial Justice in Health Training. With this grant, she  developed video-based learning modules about structural racism in healthcare-and historically across medicine. In order to truly address racialized health disparities the healthcare community must critically examine themselves, their institutions, and their practice for how they either maintain or disrupt racism. One of the ways to address the continued problem of racialized health disparities, is for the healthcare community to critically examine themselves, their institutions, and their practice for how they either maintain or disrupt racism. These modules are now integrated into existing GW health professions training programs.

Year of Award: 2021

Grant Amount: $2,000

Community Partner: Bread for the City