Expanding Research Partnerships Webinar Series, March 2023

Lili Tenney, Center for Health, Work & Environment, Colorado School of Public Health
Employers play a central role to our work as researchers and practitioners in occupational safety and health. This talk will present the rich history that the Center for Health, Work & Environment has led in engaging employers to collaborate with small, mid-sized, and multinational businesses in designing interventions and conducting translational research. These examples will present new ideas for innovative approaches in the thinking for engaging employers and strategies for developing longstanding, impactful relationships.

Gretchen Petery and Jim Grosch, National Center for Productive Aging and Work, NIOSH
Population aging is a “grand challenge” of the 21st century that touches all levels of society, including the workforce and workplace. Far reaching and complex issues such as aging require active collaborations with partners who approach the matter from diverse perspectives and disciplines. This presentation will touch on current projects by the NIOSH National Center for Productive Aging and Work that leverage the expertise of external partners to address challenges in specific sectors and cross cutting issues affecting the aging workforce more broadly.

Kirsten Almberg, Center for Healthy Work, University of Illinois Chicago
Participatory action research (PAR) methods have the potential to expand the depth, breadth, and sustainability of occupational safety and health (OSH) initiatives both in the workplace and within communities. PAR is particularly useful to explore social risk factors in worker well-being, particularly for workers in precarious jobs. The success of PAR methods, however, rests on establishing and maintaining relationships with community partners, which is easier said than done. The UIC Center for Healthy Work (CHW), a NIOSH Center of Excellence for Total Worker Health^® utilizes community-based participatory action research to document community-level experiences related to work and health and promotes policy and systems change by reducing siloes between public health, healthcare, labor, and community-based organizations. We will discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly about how we have established, maintained, and most importantly nourished these research-community partnerships to build community and workforce capacity to implement Total Worker Health at the neighborhood-level.