Ohio University receives community engagement grant

Dr. Hamel-Lambert leads efforts supporting community-based participatory research

By Anita Martin

February 3, 2009

Ohio University is one of six institutions nationwide to receive a two-year, $15,000 grant from the Faculty for the Engaged Campus, a national initiative of community-campus partnerships. The grant will support faculty development programming to advance community-engaged scholarship.

Jane Hamel-Lambert, Ph.D., director of multidisciplinary mental health education, is the principle investigator among three other Ohio co-investigators.

“The grant supports faculty competency development,” says Hamel-Lambert. “It seems that institutions have high levels of community engagement if their faculty members have these certain competencies, such as service learning and community engaged research.”

Ohio University’s faculty development initiative will build faculty competencies in community-based participatory research (CBPR) that is organized around three programs:

1. A CBPR Learning Community for university and community professionals, leading to the development of undergraduate and graduate courses in participatory methods.
2. A Faculty Fellows in Engaged Scholarship initiative, investing in engaged scholarship leaders to mentor and advance community-engagement across the region.
3. The writing of a book, Case Studies of Community-Based Participatory Research, featuring a collection of national case studies illustrating the complexities of CBPR as experienced by nationally-recognized experts and their community partners.

Hamel-Lambert is a clinical psychologist who joined the Department of Family Medicine in September of 2004 to focus on promoting interdisciplinary mental health care in Southeastern Ohio. She is co-director of Integrating Professionals for Appalachian Children (IPAC), a community-university rural network for children’s mental health; and co-director of the Appalachian Rural Health Institute, an interdisciplinary health services and research group that incorporates CBPR into its efforts.