The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has experienced multiple devastating wars and conflicts during its post-colonial era, with an estimated 5 million conflicted-related deaths in the past decade. Eastern DRC is now classified as the global region suffering the most sustained burden of internecine warfare, with extraordinary high rates of sexual violence towards women.  In this challenging setting several DC and international partners have established a renowned Panzi Hospital and foundation promoting surgical care and outreach. Partnering with the Panzi director, UM faculty and researchers are building research capacity to enable the development, evaluation and scale-up of trauma-based services, and creating research infrastructure to enable the testing of related, and much-needed, interventions.

University of Michigan urban planning professor Margaret Dewar added insight to an Oct. 23 Reuters article on the work community organizations are doing to help revitalize parts of Detroit.  Dewar has worked with community groups in Detroit to fight blight in neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosures. She also leads a CARSS sponsored project to evaluate those efforts, one of five current CARSS projects based in Detroit. The others take on issues that include health, urban planning, education, workforce development and poverty. 

• Planning for a Healthy Detroit:  Uses health impact assessments to inform city planning.
• Detroit Youth Enterprise: Steers homeless teens toward safer paths to self sufficiency.
• Driving Detroit Forward with Data: Helps decision-makers use the resources of Data Driven Detroit.
• Community College Success: Helps community college students stay in school and connect with employers in high demand fields. 

Mortgage foreclosures have hit Detroit neighborhoods especially hard, leaving even middle-class neighborhoods with hundreds of vacant houses. Neglected, those vacancies drag down property values and erode residents’ confidence in a neighborhood’s future, fostering more neglect and blight.

But in some neighborhoods, community-based organizations are fighting back – taking advantage of government and philanthropic programs designed to help head off blight and strengthen housing demand. A CARSS-supported effort led by Michigan urban planning professor Margaret Dewar aims to figure out what’s working, where, and why.

Dewar helped found a coalition called the Detroit Vacant Property Campaign, which gives community organizations the tools to fight blight, including help to:

• Keep people in their homes by educating homeowners and buyers about mortgage, property tax, and foreclosure processes.
• Develop a Vacant Property Strategy.
• Build neighborhood capacity.

With CARSS help, she and U-M urban planning colleagues Lan Deng and June Thomas will evaluate revitalization efforts in the Grandmont-Rosedale and MorningSide/East English Village neighborhoods, where residents have worked with community development corporations to board up and maintain vacant properties and to buy, rehabilitate and sell foreclosed houses.

As the project – Formative evaluation of community-based efforts to save Detroit neighborhoods from the blight of mortgage foreclosures - progresses, the team will work with Michigan Community Resources and community-based organizations to identify changes that might strengthen their efforts.

Detroit Youth Passages (DYP), led by CARSS director Rachel C. Snow of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and fellow colleague Mark Padilla now at Florida International University, hosted the Ford Foundation’s Youth Sexuality, Health and Rights Initiative Grantee Convening June 12th-14th in the city of Detroit.

DYP is a Ford Foundation funded project focused on how the economic, political, social and built environment contribute to poor sexual health outcomes among Detroit youth, including participation in sex work, and both stigmatizing and coercive relationships. This Convening allowed representatives from Ford-Foundation’s six Youth Sexuality projects across the USA to share new research findings, graduate student projects, youth perspectives, and community partnerships. CARSS is sponsoring a Detroit youth micro-enterprise project, which builds upon work funded by the Ford Foundation.

The DYP Youth Advisory Board welcomed attendees to Detroit on the first day with a showcase of their Photovoice gallery at the University of Michigan Detroit Center. There, youth participants presented their photo-montage and experience of geographic risk and the built environment of Detroit, and the impact of documenting and voicing their experience.

The Detroit-based team includes co-investigators from three community based agencies: Laura Hughes of The Ruth Ellis Center, Deena Policcicchio of Alternatives For Girls, and Angela Reyes of the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation, all of whom participated in the Convening event. On the second evening, the DYP team, CARSS and the Ford Foundation co-hosted a reception at the Fountain Bistro in Campus Martius, which was an opportunity for attendees, community partners and University representatives to relax and enjoy learning about the range of Ford-funded projects on young people’s sexuality, health and rights; and CARSS-funded projects based in Detroit.

James S. House, a world-renowned scholar who has been a leader in recognizing and demonstrating that health and illness are influenced by psychosocial processes, has been selected as the Henry Russel Lecturer for 2013 — one of the university’s highest honors for a senior member of its active faculty. House is a co-leader for the CARSS-supported Health Dynamics and Disparities project.

New projects explore solutions to health, education and urban planning challenges

When the automobile industry collapsed and the home foreclosure crisis ballooned, no place felt the crush more acutely than Detroit. The city’s problems have many connections to the plight of the urban poor. CARSS is committed to finding solutions in Detroit, funding four new Michigan-led projects there beginning this summer.

• Healthy Neighborhoods: Incorporating Health Impact Assessment into Government Planning

  As the Detroit Works Project (DWP) city planning is moving forward, there is need for a systematic, evidence-based method that brings health needs to bear on economic, land use, neighborhood, and capital infrastructure planning in Detroit. This project will support a UM-Public Health, Community and Government partnership to undertake Health Impact Assessments (HIA) of key DWP proposed investments, and sharing those HIA studies with leading Detroit community action/non-profit groups, and members of city government. Project principals have already met with the leadership of the DWP and obtained agreement that the HIA findings and recommendations will be incorporated into city planning.

• Youth Sexual Commerce & Microenterprise Development

  This project builds on an ongoing Ford Foundation funded project pertaining to the links between economic need, residential instability and sexual vulnerability among Detroit youth. Research by U-M Public Health, Alternatives for Girls, Ruth Ellis Center and DHDC has underscored the health and violence risks of residentially unstable, and chronically under-employed youth in the city. CARSS is supporting a new complementary project to identify “lessons learned” from promising micro-enterprise projects with urban youth across the USA, and a convening of such projects in Detroit in winter 2012.

• Cultivating Community College Success 

  The UM National Poverty Center is using CARSS support to design a study to evaluate 3 complementary interventions to extend community college enrollments in Detroit. Drawing on successes in NYC and elsewhere, they will partner with Detroit colleges and potential employers to design an evaluation of performance-based scholarships, enhanced counseling, and occupational placements. CARSS is supporting the recruitment of college and employer partnerships, and the collaborative design of the proposed interventions. CARSS is enthusiastic about supporting this project due to its potential to help lower-income Detroit students earn college credentials and transition to the labor market in growing fields such as healthcare and 21st century manufacturing.

• Data for Decision-Making

  The Graham Sustainability Center at UM has partnered with Data Driven Detroit to gather sustainability-related data to that, when combined with Data Driven Detroit’s annual geo-coded data on housing, land use, population, crime, traffic and infrastructure, will help guide sustainable redevelopment in the city.  While these online data provide accessible, user-friendly maps for public use, the added value of these data to city planners is unknown.  To enhance the utility of the data, CARSS is supporting “hands-on” workshops that will bring Detroit city planning staff into the shared analysis and presentation of Data Driven Detroit statistical maps to public officials, building local government capacity to use the knowledge, and giving planners the chance to suggest how Data Driven Detroit might improve their value to city planning.

Based at the University of Michigan and organized under the Office of the Vice President for Research, CARSS is a small center committed to big ideas. We bring together leading scholars, business people, policy makers and practice professionals to take on the world’s most pressing problems, translating science into social innovation.

The U.S. spends more on health care than comparable modern societies – yet has worse health outcomes. The Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities project explores how that happens – and why.

The working group met at U-M May 31 to identify important issues and  new research questions and plan the development of a proposal to be submitted to the National Council on Aging in the fall of 2012. Members also updated the group on their research efforts and findings.

Five new members joined the group, a number of guest scholars also attended, and a new node for work was established at the University of Texas, Austin. This Texas group complements two existing nodes – at the University of Michigan and in Southern California (USC and UCLA).

The group now reflects broad disciplinary expertise in the fields of:

• Demography
• Economics
• Geriatrics
• Medicine
• Population studies
• Psychology
• Social epidemiology
• Social gerontology
• Sociology

Members are affiliated with a number of eminent universities: Brandeis University, Columbia University, Emory University, Harvard University, University of California- Los Angeles, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and the University of  Texas – Austin.

Based at the University of Michigan and organized under the Office of the Vice President for Research, CARSS is a small center committed to big ideas. We bring together leading scholars, business people, policy makers and practice professionals to take on the world’s most pressing problems, translating science into social innovation.

More than 50 researchers and scholars from across the country gathered at U-M this week for a conference about sex and gender in relation to the use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs.

The conference, “Sex/Gender and the Use of Psychoactive Substances,” took place Tuesday and Wednesday at the School of Social Work. It was attended by experts from various fields including history, neurobiology, neuroscience, pharmacology, psychiatry, psychology, public health, social work, substance abuse and women’s studies.

The meeting focused on crosscutting issues and themes in the study of sex/gender related to psychoactive substances. Participants included faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduates, as well as representatives from clinical practice, community organizations and the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The first day of the conference focused, in part, on the delineation of different terminology and methodologies used when studying the topic. Participants examined what is known and not known about the subject, as well as current controversies in the field and how they might be addressed in research, clinical practice and policy.

The topics of normative drug use, problem drug use, recovery and relapse were examined, with presentations and small-group discussions that considered risk/protective factors, co-occurring issues, subgroup and life course issues, epigenetics and other topics.

The second day included a debriefing on themes from the first day, identification of questions not yet addressed, discussion of crosscutting themes and controversies, and formation of working groups to address various themes and issues after the conference.

Conference participants organized into working groups on the following areas:

• Policy/science research issues (priorities: pregnancy, criminal justice).

• Better research models (improving animal and human clinical and epidemiological studies).

• Promoting communication across science and feminism disciplines.

• Early trauma, development and life-course issues (risks and protective factors, what to do with them).

Leadership for planning and development of the conference was provided by Jill Becker, Kyla Day, Michelle McClellan and Beth Glover Reed of U-M, and Mark Greenwald of Wayne State University.

Support for the conference was provided by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society CARSS), the Substance Abuse Research Center, and the School of Social Work.

Pregnancy is an important transitional time, when a woman harkens back to how she was mothered and begins to form a maternal identity shaped by her childhood experience.  But just as loving and connected parenting provides a template for becoming a loving and connected parent, abuse can set the stage for generation after generation of relationship and parenting difficulties.

The Center for Advancing Research and Solutions for Society (CARSS) is pleased to announce start-up support for a new project, Pregnancy & Traumatic Stress, which commits an interdisciplinary and multi-national team to finding interventions that will help new mothers and mothers-to-be break the cycles of trauma.

The project, led by University of Michigan nursing associate professor Julia Seng, will include researchers in Australia and the United Kingdom.  Their first step is to continue developing an intervention that provides new mothers with information, skills, and social support to help them raise a psychologically resilient child.

“This project builds upon our development of the first intervention for pregnant women – addressing their abuse-related post traumatic stress at the critical juncture, as they become mothers,” said Seng.

The project gets to the heart of a problem that has major mental and community health implications. Impaired mother-child bonding can lead to attachment problems for the infant – which in turn can lead to emotional, behavioral, and health issues during childhood and beyond. Some mothers with unresolved traumatic stress from their own abuse experiences are less likely to be able to protect their children from abusers in the immediate and extended family. They’re also more likely to use harsher, erratic discipline and to be less sensitive to understanding their child’s needs.

The first phase of the project includes building upon work already done by Seng and others to develop a new skill-building program in both English and Spanish, which will include a website and a downloadable mp3 version. The next step will be to refine the intervention and pilot test it in different cultural/national settings.

Based at the University of Michigan and organized under the Office of the Vice President for Research, CARSS is a small center committed to big ideas. We bring together leading scholars, business people, policy makers and practice professionals to address the world’s most pressing problems and translate science into social innovation.

University of Michigan adjunct assistant professor Stephanie Brown, co-author of the recently published
book Moving Beyond Self-Interest: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology, Neuroscience, and the Social
Sciences (Oxford University Press, 2012), will speak this summer at a groundbreaking international
conference that looks at the science behind human compassion.

Along with Brown, whose work in this area began as a CARSS project, several others who authored chapters
in the book (Sue Carter, Dacher Keltner, Stephen Porges) are also slated to speak at The Science of
Compassion: Origins, Measures and Interventions July 19-22 in Telluride, Colo.

The conference will bring together scholars from various disciplines to focus on the science of
compassion in hopes of establishing a shared agenda for rigorous scientific inquiry into the
psychological properties, biological underpinnings, health correlates, and trainability of compassion.

CARSS (along with Oxford University Press) is pleased to help make complimentary copies of the Moving
Beyond Self-Interest book available to speakers at the conference.

“This a great opportunity for CARSS to help leverage the investment it previously made in the creation
of the book, and by extension to further help promote the several lines of scholarship that starting to
open up,” said CARSS project manager Doug Pritchett.