Beyond the Manuscript: Building a Partnership at the Top: Introducing PCHP's New Co-Editor-in-Chief, Ann-Gel Palermo
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Welcome to Progress in Community Health Partnerships'latest episode of our Beyond the Manuscriptpodcast. In each volume of the Journal, the editors select one article for our Beyond the Manuscriptpost-study interview with the authors. Beyond the Manuscriptprovides the authors the opportunity to tell listeners what they would want to know about the project beyond what went into the final manuscript.
In this episode of Beyond the Manuscript, Editor-in-Chief, Hal Strelnick, interviews Ann-Gel Palermo, Progress in Community Health Partnership'snew Co-Editor-in-Chief.
Good morning, Ann-Gel.
Good morning, Hal.
And welcome to Beyond the Manuscript. This morning, I wanted to ask you some questions about yourself and about your vision for becoming the first co-editor-in-chief of Progress in Community Health Partnerships. So perhaps you could start by telling me a little bit about yourself and how your experiences prepared you for helping provide leadership for the journal going into the future.
Sure. Well, first, I want to say that it is an honor and privilege to serve in this role as co-editor-in-chief, and specifically with a focus on centering the voice of community partners in the literature world, I guess you could say, of community and campus partnerships and through this journal, and using the journal as a platform to center the voice of community partners.
So I have been involved in community-based participatory work in that space for the last 20 years. I started really when I was a masters student at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and got my first exposure and experience with my very first mentor in this space by the name of Ricardo Guzman, who at the time was the executive director of a multiservice social human service agency in Southwest Detroit called CHASS (Community Health and Social Services Center, Inc.).
He really took me under his wing and taught me how community partners navigate the academic world, and particularly partnerships with research organizations, specifically researchers. And those were his academic partners at the school of public health. So I had the privilege to really be taught by the researchers but then have really hands-on applied experiences of community-based public health practice with an amazing mentor like Ricardo.
And then once I left Michigan, I moved to New York City and started working for a large academic hospital, and, in a particular, working for a small policy thinktank that the medical center started. And it was an opportunity to really understand sort of Medicare policy issues impacting [End Page 9]older adults in East Harlem, where this large academic hospital is located. And had the opportunity to really begin developing relationships, getting involved in community networks and coalitions.
And right around that time, the CDC started the Urban Research Center Program, and there was an interest in figuring out what works to improve the health of urban populations. And that was a center-wide initiative, and so the CDC funded various urban research centers across the country, and at that time was starting one in York City at the New York Academy of Medicine.
And I sort of got scooped up with a number of other community leaders and partners and individuals that were part of various coalitions to become an advisory board member of this new urban research center. It was interesting to figure out what are the determinants of, you know, drug use, and why it was easier to get drugs than to get help for drugs. And so that became a new sandbox for me.
And over the last 20 years working in East Harlem and being a part of the urban research...
