Nursing Professor Cathy Sullivan named as the 2010 Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award winner

Associate Professor of Nursing Cathy Sullivan is the winner of the 2010 Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award. The award will support her work with Catholic Social Services, the Refugee Assistance and Immigration Services (RAIS) program, and the newly formed Refugee Youth Choir in Mountain View.

See a short, eight-minute video of Cathy Sullivan's fall 2009 class in action with the Bhutanese and Sudanese refugee communities.

The Refugee Youth Choir is composed of children and teens from many different countries, including Somalia, Bhutan, Sudan and Iraq. Over the next year, Professor Sullivan and a group of senior nursing students will work with these young people to identify and address health concerns affecting themselves and their families. These are likely to include dealing with the stress of relocation to a new country, building positive peer support networks, avoiding harmful behaviors, and accessing health care in a new and very different land. This community health learning experience will increase the students' awareness of diversity in Anchorage and give them hands-on practice with some of the ways health care providers must adapt to meet the needs of new immigrants.

The Selkregg Community Engagement and Service Learning Award supports faculty to develop community-based, applied research and course-based service-learning projects. The annual $5,000 award encourages, rewards and inspires faculty to creatively engage their students in learning and research projects that benefit both the students and the community at large. The outcomes of these projects include significant discipline-based scholarship, community partnerships and student leadership opportunities.

For more information, please contact the Center for Community Engagement & Learning, (907) 786-4062, engage@uaa.alaska.edu.