Children’s Well-Being Projects
Jennifer Bolden-Bush, through her lab, the Behavior and Learning Lab, has maintained a four-year, mutually beneficial community-engagement partnership with the Shora Foundation, providing trauma-informed, evidence-based clinical services to children and families who experience systemic challenges. This collaboration has received funding from the University of Tennessee’s Community-University Research Collaboration Initiative (CURCI) for three of those four years. More recently, the partnership expanded to support Shora’s Healing Pathways Clinic (HPC), broadening access to mental health services while maintaining a central focus on children and families. Through this collaboration, University of Tennessee students receive hands-on training in trauma-informed clinical practice while contributing to sustainable, community-based mental health support—advancing the University’s land-grant mission to serve the public good through engaged scholarship and community collaboration.
Jasmine Coleman is currently working on a project to understand the lived experiences of Black youth whose sibling is currently or has previously been involved with the justice system. This project involves 1) establishing an advisory board of Black youth with experiences of sibling justice system involvement; 2) using qualitative interviews to document these lived experiences and to develop a conceptual model explaining the processes through which sibling justice system involvement may impact Black youth; and 3) testing the conceptual model using survey data from a local sample of Black youth. Findings from this project have the potential to provide a foundation for early intervention for Black youth whose sibling becomes involved in the justice system.
Andrea Joseph-McCatty is working on a project that reimagines social-emotional learning (SEL) frameworks to be responsive to the unique gendered and racialized experiences Black girls. While conventional SEL frameworks are developed to be responsive to general student needs, I seek to co-construct a SEL framework for Black girls rooted in their identity development, community connectedness, culturally responsive practices, trauma-informed practices, and their strengths. By developing culturally responsive, gender-specific, and trauma-informed SEL interventions, my work aims to support Black girls’ emotional well-being, affirm their identities, and reduce their disproportionate exposure to exclusionary discipline.
Faculty
