Lauda Series
About the Donald P. Lauda Wellness Lecture
Event: Donald P. Lauda Wellness Lecture 2024 on [Re]turn to the Community: Food Insecurity and a Critical Re-envisioning of Asset-Based Public Health Approaches
Date: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: CPaCE Conference Room
Black communities are disproportionately impacted by food insecurity and food access disparities, a crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To date, prevailing public health solutions addressing food-related inequities often focus on downstream, individual-level interventions, (e.g., food donation or assistance programs), and do not meaningfully interrogate broader structures and root-causes (e.g., prohibitive food and agricultural policies, legacies of cultural erasure). Missing from public health discourse is a more direct engagement with how food insecurity disparities begin at higher levels of food production and the unique social assets and collective voice of a community or population, such as their capacity to grow and distribute their own food and address structural inequities.
In this talk, Dr. Andrew Carter, professor at San Jose State University, will share some of his key findings and ethnographic reflections from his upcoming book project Seeds of Sovereignty. Dr. Carter's research traces the historical legacies of African, Caribbean, and Black (ACB) women farmers and their unique capacities to support community food security and restore frayed cultural foodways. Project findings offer new ways to think about asset-based public health campaigns and food security interventions. The presentation will be of interest to students, researchers, community-based organizers, and applied practitioners and professionals with a stake in advancing social justice principles in public health, agriculture, and beyond.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Carter is an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health and Recreation at San Jose State University. His research interests include health disparities, food systems, community-based participatory research, and intercultural communication. A primary feature of his work explores how Black farmers challenge norms, power inequities, and structural barriers in the agriculture industry to preserve their cultural legacies and use farming as a vehicle to address broader social, public health, and economic disparities across the Black diaspora. He has published work in disciplinary diverse academic journals such as Health Communication, Communication Theory, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise, and Health, Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, and Critical Public Health.
Event: Donald P. Lauda Wellness Lecture on State of Emergency: A Call to Action on Homelessness
Date: Thursday, April 27, 2023
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Location: In-person CPaCE Conference Room 100A and virtually via Zoom
RSVP: Coming Soon!
The homelessness crisis goes beyond housing insecurity to reflect the significant impact of the public health infrastructure, economy and basic needs on overall well-being. Dr. Virginia Gray, Ms. Danielle Munoz, and Mr. Duke Givens will share their experience working to address the social and economic consequences underlying the homelessness crisis to improve quality of life and housing security within the community.
Speaker Bios:
Dr. Virginia Gray is an Associate Professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at CSULB. Her research focuses on development and evaluation of community nutrition programs among limited resource audiences, families, and college students. Dr. Gray serves as Co-Project Director for the CalFresh Healthy Living grant at CSULB.
Duke Givens is a Long Beach native who grew up in the 6th district of Long Beach, CA. He received his education in the Long Beach school district, and graduated from Long Beach Poly High School. He also served in the United States Airforce during the desert storm conflict, and was honorably discharged. Soon after he was discharged, he attended Long Beach City College to study photography. Photography would become a staple in Duke's life. He would go on to create a body of work that has been showcased in different venues and has received a multitude of acknowledgements and awards. These acknowledgements and awards include, but are not limited to, The NAACP Community Service Award, recognition from the United States Congress for community efforts, the African American Men's Forum President's Award, and most recently induction into the Long Beach City College Hall of Fame. His passion for helping the most vulnerable among us led him to found the non-proft, Care Closet LBC. The core of Care Closet LBC is a steadfast commitment to meeting the needs of the homeless community, focusing on serving people where they are, by attending to both their immediate needs and helping facilitate their long-term goals -- from delivering sleeping bags and new shoes, to providing scholarships and employement opportunities.
Danielle Munoz is the director of the basic needs department at CSULB. Danielle is a licensed marriage and family therapist and has a background primarily in mental health. In 2016 she was hired at Sacramento State as a case manager for students in crisis and within 5 years worked with the campus to create the first emergency housing program, expanded emergency grants and created the first CARES office. Danielle joined the CSULB family in August 2022 and primarily focuses on meeting the housing and food needs of students. Danielle's team coordinates emergency housing, rapid rehousing, emergency funds, CalFresh Outreach, CalFresh healthy living, Beach Bites and a grocery assistance program for undocumented students.
Event: Donald P. Lauda Wellness Lecture on The Global Public Health and Human Rights Imperative
Date: Wednesday, April 20, 2022
Time: 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Location: Virtual Event
Health and human rights are indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated. The desire goal is to improve the normative reach of health as a fundamental human right and to enhance its enjoyment. Drs. Alaei will share their work on promoting the right to health and protecting the right to higher education.
Bio:
Dr. Arash Alaei is Director of the Institute for International Health and Education. Before joining the College of Health and Human Services as a lecturer, he has been the senior consultant for WHO, UNICEF, USAID/PEPFAR, CDC, UNAIDS, and Tajikistan Ministry of Health. He has also served as the Associate Vice Provost for International Education, Clinical Associate professor, and the co-founding Directors of the Global Institute for Health and Human Rights.
Dr. Kamiar Alaei currently serves as the Department Chair of Health Science and professor of global health policy at CSULB. He studied medicine, epidemiology, international health, health policy, and international human rights law at prestigious universities such as Harvard and Oxford.
For more than two decades, Arash and Kamiar have been working on prevention, care, and support of people living with HIV in vulnerable and key populations. They co-founded the first “Triangular Clinic” for three target groups in Iran (drug users, HIV patients, and STD cases) which was documented by the World Health Organization as a “Best Practice Model.”
Lauda Lecture Flyer : Lauda Lecture 2022 (PDF)
Dr. Kamiar Alaei
Dr. Arash Alaei
Responding to an Aging Society: Partnerships in Practice
Aging is a global phenomenon that poses both challenges and opportunities for creative solutions and collaborations. Some of the issues facing aging societies everywhere are diverse needs and rapid growth in the context of limited resources, various sources of vulnerability, and a limited workforce to promote healthy and engaged aging. In this talk, we will highlight several of the collaborative efforts between CSULB College of Health and Human Services and community partners to develop sustainable partnerships and solutions to respond to an aging society. [Read more]
