Beyond the Manuscript: “Don’t Shoot, I Want to Grow Up”: Findings of a Multi-city Youth-led Health Assessment

Abstract

Beyond the Manuscript: “Don’t Shoot, I Want to Grow Up”: Findings of a Multi-city Youth-led Health Assessment Vanessa de Danzine, Catalina Tang Yan, and Necole Muhammad Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships’ latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscript podcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscript post-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscript provides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript. In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Associate Editor, Vanessa de Danzine interviews Catalina Tang Yan and Necole Muhammad, authors of “Don’t Shoot, I Want to Grow Up”: Findings of a Multi-city Youth-led Health Assessment Vanessa de Danzine: Hi. Good day. Welcome. Glad to have the opportunity to interview you. My name is Vanessa de Danzine. I’m a retired detective in the New York City Police Department. I’m the past chair of the Community-Based Public Health Caucus, and I’m the past president of the National Community-Based Organization Network and, of course, an associate editor for the Journal of Progress in Community Health Partnership. I’d like to welcome you to this podcast. Catalina Tang Yan: Thank you. So, Necole, do you want to introduce yourself? Necole Muhammad: Oh, sure. So I am Necole Muhammad. I am a native of Chicago, Illinois, and during the highlights of the study and the action of the study at that time I was the principal at Little Black Pearl Art and Design Academy, and that is a high school in Chicago. And it was a phenomenal experience, and just the experience that we had working with the youth, once I resigned from my position as a principal, I immediately moved into gun-violence reduction. So that is currently what I do. I’m a licensed clinical social worker, and so that’s me. That’s me. Catalina Tang Yan: Thank you so much for having us here. My name is Catalina Tang Yan. I go by she/her/hers. I’m currently a doctoral candidate at Boston University School of Social Work, and I was born and raised in Colombia, South America. My family are Chinese migrants from the south, and I came here to the U.S. at the age of 16. My background prior to pursuing this doctoral degree—I got politicized as a youth leader in Boston, and I worked primarily with young people, youth of color out of school time in social-justice-based programs, and my research really focuses on community-based participatory research approaches to health equity and racial justice. Vanessa de Danzine: Well, thank you ladies both for joining us today. I’m really excited. I had a wonderful time reading the manuscript. I’d like for you to tell me a little bit more about your partnership and how it all began. Catalina Tang Yan: I can get started and set a little bit the scene, if that’s okay, from our end. So, this partnership was also possible with the support of Dr. Linda Sprague Martinez, who served as the principal investigator of the project. And she serves as an associate professor at Boston University School of Social Work. And in [End Page 319] partnership with the America’s Promise Alliance, the Center for Promise, we actually received generous funding, and the purpose of the focus of the funding was really exploring factors that promoted and hindered the health and well-being of young people. And so leveraging Dr. Linda Sprague Martinez and also her experience and work partnering with youth and community-based organizations to really conduct health assessments, we actually were able to really identify a series of previous partners or community-based organizations across five cities in 2016. And in terms of really thinking about the partnerships, we thought about, what is the kinda work that they’re doing to uplift the voices and amplify the voices of young people? How is this aligned with the ways that this can enrich the work that they do? And so, we definitely...