Previous Grant Recipients
Erin Wentzell, Health, Human Function, and Rehabilitation Sciences
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
Robert Orttung, Elliott School of International Affairs
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
Sarah M Ray, Graduate School of Education and Human Development
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
Keith Cole, Health, Human Function, andRehabilitation Science
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
Michael W. Long, Prevention and Community Health (SPH)
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)
Maranda Ward, Clinical Research and Leadership (SMHS)
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
Course Development Grants
GW faculty receive Nashman Center faculty development grants to support community engaged scholarship course development annually.
2022 Grants to Support Class Development
- CIXD 3085: Dr. Kevin Patton, Assistant Professor at GW's Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, has been awarded a Nashman Center faculty development grant for his Corcoran Interaction Design course: CIXD 3085. Dr. Patton is using the grant to get support to develop a community engaged element for the course. The course itself looks at impacts of design decisions through the lens of techno utopia with theory and case studies. Specifically, the course looks at how implementations of popular technologies, like machine learning, data, computer vision, the internet of things, VR, and drones, shape a designer’s vision and impact different communities through automated surveillance, algorithmic bias, agency, inequality, labor, and dehumanization. Adding a community engaged element will allow students to witness these impacts firsthand and will enable a different resonance of the material for the students.
- UW 1020: Dr. Jameta Nicole Barlow, Assistant Professor in the University Writing Program, has been awarded a Nashman Center faculty development grant for UW 1020: Writing Science and Health, Women's Health as a Point of Inquiry. The proposed course redesign aims to embody principles of decolonized science and health through the engagement of DC community organizations. Students will transfer their bidirectional knowledges from the community organization and classrooms to reimagine the praxis of science and health interventions. Each participating organization will benefit from the research and writing skills of students assigned to their organization’s special project for the semester.
2021 Grants to support class development:
- HOL 8100: Dr. Maria Cseh and Jessica Hinshaw of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development have been awarded a Nashman Center faculty development grant for HOL 8100: Special Topics in Human Organizational Learning. This grant supported the development of a new community engaged scholarship course, HOL 8100:Developing Global Mindfulness through Participatory Community Engagement. This course prepares students to become engaged citizens and contributors to the public good by creating opportunities to enhance students’ and community partners’ global competence and mindfulness, and their critical and systems thinking, while finding solution to local organizational problems through mutual learning and participatory service-learning.
- EDU 6272: Dr. Rebecca Thessin of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development has been awarded a Nashman Center faculty development grant for EDU 6272: Leading Evidence-Based Action Research for School Improvement. This grant supports student research and publication of their action research projects and for refinements to how students reflect on and assess their own leadership learning. EDUC 6272: Leading Evidence-Based Action Research for School Improvement engages students in action research projects with school partners. Revisions to the course will incorporate opportunities for students to publicize their action research projects, in collaboration with the instructor, and enhance how students reflect on project outcomes for partners and in relation to their own leadership learning. This course revision aligns with the instructor’s own research work in leading school improvement as well, and will contribute to continued study on student learning from their leadership of action research assignments.