When I was asked by Dr. Tashara Leak if I could help out with a new project the lab is launching called “Black Girls for Wellness,” I was ecstatic. Black Girls for Wellness is an initiative inspired by the Leak Research Group’s Advanced Cooking Education Program (ACE), a 12 week culturally tailored telehealth intervention designed for Black adolescent girls. The intervention entails weekly nutrition education lessons, cooking experiences (with ingredients provided), and Afrocentric dance classes. This program is particularly meaningful to me because it is a targeted intervention designed to meet the unique needs of Black adolescent youth at risk for type 2 diabetes. One way Black Girls for Wellness does this is through the incorporation of “girl chats” that support the development of community in which teens feel safe enough to open up about issues relevant to experience of Black adolescence. My hope for the program is that girls who participate gain knowledge about nutritional wellbeing and develop cooking skills while also becoming more confident in their identities as young Black girls.

Despite my initial excitement to facilitate this program, my summer turned out to be a completely different experience than I was expecting due to the IRB approval for the project taking much longer than anticipated. To my disappointment, we were unable to begin the Black Girls for Wellness Program, but the change of plans gave me the opportunity to develop another skill that was essential to my translational research training: learning how to effectively communicate about our program’s goals to our community partners. I was assigned with the task of creating a handout that would provide concise yet detailed information about the significance of Black Girls for Wellness. The handout would be used to communicate to various different stakeholders, including youth participants’ families and community partners such as Weill Cornell and the Center for African and Diaspora Dance. Although this didn’t seem like too hard of a job at first, it was a bit challenging to create an accessible product that could relay the program’s intentions while also providing logistical information about program implementation. Before starting, I looked at previous ACE handouts to gain inspiration. Then, I looked at prior grant submissions and other documents regarding Black Girls for Wellness to extract essential information to include in the handout. This process helped me to hone the skill of effectively communicating translational research because it’s easy to get carried away with details instead of summarizing the overall intended impact. All in all, I enjoyed this experience of thinking creatively about the ways we can engage our stakeholders through the dissemination of communications materials. By creating the one-pager, I was able to present our program’s mission and curriculum contents effectively to multiple audiences.

Looking back on my summer experiences, despite the initial setback, I was able to learn about the essential aspects of translational research that precede the actual intervention. Developing communications materials is a significant part of doing translational work because it engages stakeholders at earlier stages of the partnership so that everyone can be informed on the goals and intentions of the intervention. I’m happy to share that after the summer, our IRB was officially approved and we are now preparing to launch the pilot. I’m super excited to be jumping into the implementation part of the project as a facilitator and am looking forward to seeing the impact of our program on the lives of young girls living in New York City.

When Things Don't Go As Planned