Funding Awarded to the University of Iowa’s Gathering Welcome Project

Posted by Sam Watson on July 16th, 2019 Posted in: Funding
Tags: Funding, SLIS, Success Stories

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The GMR office is excited to announce funding for the Gathering Welcome: Creating a Curriculum to Teach Health Literacy to Immigrant and Refugee Women via our Health Information Outreach award.

Project:

Description:  The result of this project will be a cohesive, vetted curriculum designed to improve the health literacy and health information access and outcomes of refugee women living in Johnson and Linn counties in Iowa. This project will develop a formal curriculum in collaboration with the College of Education, the Obermann Center Public Engagement Working Group, and the School of Public Health.  The new curriculum will be tested through delivery to the target population by SLIS students, encouraging them to understand the challenges of meeting the needs of traditionally underserved individuals and promoting the NLM’s consumer health information resources.  This project is meant to create replicable programming for other community organizations and has the additional benefit of engaging SLIS students with traditionally underserved communities using NLM resources.

Objectives:  The primary goals of this project are to 1) increase knowledge regarding the health information needs and health literacy of refugee women. This will result in public health, information, and resettlement organizations being better equipped to address the gaps in displaced women’s abilities to access health information for themselves and their families.  2) Develop an effectual program to improve the health literacy of refugee women so that they will be better equipped to seek health information and, ultimately, care in the US. 3) Promote health librarianship, working with traditionally underserved populations, and NLM community health information resources to SLIS students. 4) Disseminate the project findings and resultant initiative to library science schools and community organizations so that they will be able to implement this programming in their communities.