RF CUNY – Center for Systems and Community Design

I've been involved with CUNY's Center for Systems and Community Design on a project basis since 2021. As a non-expert in each of the projects I have contributed to, my role has been to synthesize and visualize different teams' research to aid in sharing it out to their partners and community members as well as develop and facilitate workshops to gather feedback and new insights in the spirit of human- and community-centered design in service of public health.

I first started working with Dr. Melissa Fuster (Tulane) on The LARiA Project (Latin American Restaurants in Action) summer 2021 to provide hands-on design support to co-create healthy eating initiatives alongside Latin American restaurants in New York City. The following year I worked with Dr. Terry Huang and Dr. Victoria Ngo (CUNY SPH), each of whom lead projects that aim to help specific New York City communities access mental healthcare resources. My latest collaboration with the Center took place Spring 2024 with Dr. Nasim Sabounchi (CUNY SPH) to help develop the agenda, materials and activities for two workshop sessions to explore how telehealth services can be used to connect people with opioid use disorders with medications and therapeutic services.

Below are some snapshots of work that resulted from this collaboration.

LARiA
Co-creating healthy eating interventions with Latin American restaurants in New York City


This is the exported Mural board for LARiA, where you can get a sense of the overall project process:

1) Partner restaurant online and experiential audit of their menus, visuals and messaging

2) Audience definition using customer archetypes, motivations and needs — all of which were created and defined using qualitative interview responses as well as quantitative survey input

3) Internal ideation and workshop preparation

Following this internal work, we met with owners, chefs and staff from each restaurant individually to collaboratively ideate healthy eating initiatives that suit each restaurant's business model, needs, and customers



Our collaboration with the first partner restaurant resulted in the introduction of pre-designed bowls featuring lean proteins as well as the addition of roasted vegetables as a main, base, or side to increase the potential nutritional quality of their offerings.

The second partner restaurant's food was already nutritionally sound, however, their biggest challenge was figuring out how to change customers' perception of Mexican food as being unhealthy. With their owner and staff, we developed a communications toolkit to help them find ways to talk about their ingredients, processes and dishes that highlight their authenticity and healthfulness.

Harlem Strong
Collaborating with organizations in Harlem to help create ways for Black and Brown neighborhood residents to access mental health resources and treatment

For Harlem Strong, I worked closely with the research team to develop the plan for two collaborative workshops meant to help us understand the different ways that Black and Brown Harlem residents access mental health care through different organizations (housing, community based organizations, faith based organizations, and primary healthcare providers).

The first workshop was divided into groups to walk through a flowchart to understand the different options that the potential clients have when seeking out mental health treatment and resources. The second workshop was a share out of the completed journey maps and insights from the first session, followed by an open ideation brainstorm with community members, stakeholders, researchers and care providers.

Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network (CPCRN)
Connecting Asian American cancer patients in New York City with culturally relevant mental health resources and treatment

With the CPCRN team, I developed two interactive patient journey maps (for the cancer diagnosis and treatment experience as well as for seeking out mental health treatment), synthesized the team's research into six potential territories to explore for solutions, and organized two webinars to share out our research and to host three professionals in the field whose organizations are actively working to connect cancer patients with mental health support.

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