Georgia Policy Labs Announces Engaged Research Competition Winner

ATLANTA - Georgia State University's Georgia Policy Labs (GPL) has named social worker Lindsey Disney the winner of its fifth annual Engaged Research Competition.

Disney, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, will receive $30,000 to support a research-practice partnership with the Refugee Women's Network (RWN), a metro-Atlanta nonprofit that provides culturally and linguistically tailored programs for refugee and immigrant women and families.

Disney and RWN will launch the Youth Wellness Training Collaborative to train and support 10 Arabic-, Dari- and Swahili-speaking RWN staff members as they lead a novel girls emotional wellness program titled Youth Wellness Initiative. The Youth Wellness Training Collaborative will include four lunch-and-learn trainings to help understand the effects of traumatic and chronic stress on refugee youth, as well as a monthly group consultation.

Through training and group consultation, the Youth Wellness Training Collaborative will equip RWN staff with the knowledge and skills needed to deliver the Youth Wellness Initiative while also fostering their own well-being, resilience and capacity to sustain this important work over time. The project will examine whether the training reduces secondary traumatic stress and work-related burnout and increases resilience among RWN staff.

"We know from the community health worker literature that community-based mental health models work, but if we want the youth program to truly succeed across diverse cultural and language groups, we need to make sure the workers themselves have the training and ongoing support they need," Disney said. "This project gives us an opportunity to learn what it takes to equip and sustain a strong community mental health workforce."

The partnership builds on existing work between Disney and RWN, through which Disney has trained RWN staff to incorporate mindfulness into gardening and crocheting groups serving Arabic-, Dari- and Swahili-speaking refugee communities. The project will expand that collaboration and lay the groundwork for potential expansion to additional language communities.

The Engaged Research Competition, funded by the Andrew Young School, the Office of the Provost, the Dan E. Sweat Endowment and the W.J. Usery Endowment, promotes partnership-based research by Georgia State faculty and researchers by helping remove structural barriers to partner-driven research, including publication timelines, data-sharing complications and the time needed to build trust with community partners.

Jonathan Smith, a professor of economics, W.J. Usery chair and a faculty director of GPL; Ibnat Hasn, a graduate research assistant with GPL; and Janelle Clay, senior manager of research and evaluation at Achieve Atlanta, a partner of GPL, judged this year's competition. GPL has previously selected four winners of the Engaged Research Competition.