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KU awarded $1M to help connect underrepresented KC youths with ‘out-of-school’ opportunities
LAWRENCE — A team led by researchers at the University of Kansas has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help underrepresented Kansas City youths access enriching out-of-school opportunities. The grant will fund development of a mobile app and other tools to help teens on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border discover those opportunities — and to connect with transportation services that can get them around town to where those opportunities are located.
KU center appraises Douglas County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
LAWRENCE — A new paper by researchers at the Center for Community Health and Development, an academic health department within the University of Kansas Life Span Institute, details their monitoring and evaluation of the COVID-19 response of the Douglas County public health system. The findings were just reported in the peer-reviewed journal Health Promotion Practice.
KU offering new online maintenance, warehouse layout training
OVERLAND PARK — The strain on global supply chains since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified the need for improvements to many components of the manufacturing industry. University of Kansas Lifelong & Professional Education answered with expanded online, self-paced certifications and courses in maintenance management, supply chain, logistics, technology management, project management and more.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Cody Howard, School of Engineering, 785-864-2936, [email protected], @kuengineering
KU awarded $1M to help connect underrepresented KC youths with ‘out-of-school’ opportunities
LAWRENCE — A team led by researchers at the University of Kansas has received a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help underrepresented Kansas City youths access enriching out-of-school opportunities.
Internships, part-time jobs and other learning experiences are “useful for young people to really learn more about themselves and cultivate their identities,” said Alexandra Kondyli, associate professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering at KU. The grant will fund development of a mobile app and other tools to help teens on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border discover those opportunities — and to connect with transportation services that can get them around town to where those opportunities are located.
“We want to implement new mobility options young people can use to go to out-of-school opportunities, while minimizing energy consumption and transportation costs,” said Kondyli, the project’s leader. “We’re trying to address accessibility barriers that underrepresented youths are facing.”
KU is partnering with a number of Kansas City organizations on the project, including the Kansas City Public Library, KC Digital Drive, ThrYve and Keystone Community Corporation, as well as transit, bike and micro-transit providers in the area.
Their challenge: In sprawling, low-density metropolitan areas like Kansas City, the physical disconnect between residential areas and OST opportunities — combined with unreliable and inefficient transportation services — creates two fundamentally different experiences: Youths from affluent homes and school districts, who are disproportionately white, have greater access than youths from lower-income homes and schools, who are disproportionately Black and Latino.
“The motivation is to support the young people in the Kansas City region and to support them in such a way that not only positively impacts their personal and professional growth, but it impacts our city as a whole,” said Andrea Ellis, director of strategic learning at Kansas City Public Library.
The project is also drawing widely from resources at KU, with participation from the KU Transportation Center and the Center for Community Health & Development.
“It is critical that we address transportation as a determinant or underlying factor that contributes to inequities experienced by youth and families in our communities,” said Jomella Watson-Thompson, associate director for community participation and research at the Center for Community Health & Development. “A key strategy identified by partners, youth and families is the need to reduce accessibility barriers that impede participation of youth in available positive opportunities in our community, including employment, educational supports and pro-social activities.”
“What we found in our research — and research that our partners have conducted — is that students who don’t have after-school transportation don’t have the same opportunities to get jobs or internships or other ways to improve themselves professionally,” said Lisa Koch, associate director for research, partnership & innovation at the KU Transportation Center. “That gap of being able to have opportunities to grow work skills really impacts them throughout their education and careers.”
She added: “This is a very special grant.”
The grant was awarded through the federal government’s Civic Innovation Challenge, which funds research-based projects which address community priorities and have the potential for long-term impact. The KU project was one of 17 nationwide to receive backing during the CIVIC Innovation Challenge and one of six on the mobility track.
Kondyli said she hoped the project results in work that improves the lives of Kansas City youths.
“These are folks that are really young, trying to explore opportunities and trying to learn more about what they’d like to be involved with in the future,” she said. “Breaking the accessibility barriers will help educate them further and grow their occupational identities.”
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
KU center appraises Douglas County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic
LAWRENCE — A new paper by researchers at the Center for Community Health and Development, an academic health department within the University of Kansas Life Span Institute, details their monitoring and evaluation of the COVID-19 response of the Douglas County public health system.
The findings were just reported in the peer-reviewed journal Health Promotion Practice.
As the pandemic was emerging, there was little understanding of the nature of local public health responses and what enabled them. The KU CCHD partnered with Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health and the Unified Command to better understand the local COVID-19 response.
“My colleagues and I adapted our center’s monitoring and evaluation system to document and analyze the unfolding of public health measures implemented in Lawrence and Douglas County,” said lead author Christina Holt, investigator and director of training and technical assistance at the CCHD. “With funding from the Kansas Health Foundation, we documented and characterized nearly 1,000 local response activities and their contribution to bending the curve of new cases of COVID-19 in the community. By reflecting with local partners on factors associated with the pattern of cases, we developed a better understanding of local efforts.”
Key local partners in the COVID-19 response efforts included Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, LMH Health, Douglas County Emergency Management, the Heartland Clinic, KU Emergency Management, Douglas County’s COVID-19 Unified Command, local school districts, the City of Lawrence, Lawrence Community Shelter, Family Promise and local nonprofits. Representatives from those groups met in sessions facilitated by the KU researchers to reflect on factors associated with increases or decreases in the patterns of new cases and response activities.
“As the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread in 2020, most communities had good surveillance systems in place to track new cases of COVID-19,” said co-author Stephen Fawcett, senior adviser at CCHD and Kansas Health Foundation Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the KU Department of Applied Behavioral Science. “But less information was available about the response — that is, the programs, policies and practices that local health systems were putting in place to respond to the changing pandemic. If we could construct a well-documented picture of the local COVID-19 response, partners would have more information to make adjustments. That’s what this case study tried to do.”
The most important findings of the center’s community-engaged scholarship addressed which COVID-19 response activities and events were related to increases and decreases in new cases in Douglas County, according to the stakeholders themselves.
The authors found several key factors associated with delaying the rise in cases from the initial worldwide outbreak: local school and university decisions to hold classes online after spring break; closures of recreation centers and libraries; a statewide stay-at-home order; and prohibitions of large gatherings.
Once COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Douglas County, authors cited three key factors for controlling the outbreak: forming a Unified Command structure for COVID-19 response; state and local stay-at-home orders; and changes in business practices.
But the subsequent lifting of statewide restrictions, outbreaks in bars and fuller reopening of businesses were associated with a rise in cases, the researchers determined. Factors that “bent the curve” following the uptick included Douglas County and statewide mask-wearing mandates and bar closings. Later in the pandemic, a second rise was seen locally that the researchers tied to KU students moving back to town and into congregate housing and KU mass testing for students, faculty and staff.
The study found this second rise was reduced by KU’s crackdown on fraternities not complying with COVID safety, a ban on alcohol sales in later hours, bar/restaurant inspections and a Lawrence City Commission ordinance to ticket COVID-19 regulation noncompliance. A KU cut in testing to a more targeted approach later in August may also have led to fewer cases detected.
The study found, “Ongoing factors include some K-12 schools opening, with varied compliance with public health guidance (e.g., allowing fall/winter sports). Factors associated with increased cases from September and continuing through November included social gatherings, athletics and inability to socially distance in congregate living settings.”
Ultimately, KU researchers, in collaboration with partners in the local public health system, sought to better understand the public-health response to the pandemic and to use this information to make adjustments.
“Our Unified Command partners — the City of Lawrence, Douglas County, KU, LMH Health, USD 497 and the Chamber of Commerce — were actively engaged in the sessions facilitated by the Center for Community Health and Development,” said Dan Partridge, director of Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, who served as a co-author on the study. “I observed that these sessions helped all of us to take a pause and broaden our field of view. In doing so our collective sense of what works was sharpened and our ability to continue to improve was enhanced.”
In addition to Holt, Fawcett and Partridge, co-authors of the study were Ruaa Hassaballa-Muhammad and Sonia Jordan of Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.
The KU team said they were particularly impressed with efforts of local public-health partners, including equity impact advisers of the Unified Command, to try to minimize the potential harm of public-health measures for those most vulnerable.
“Locally, folks have been very conscientious to try to have an equity lens in responding to the pandemic,” Holt said. “They worked to reduce some of the huge disparities in outcomes seen between different groups. Our local public health community is very proud that there are far less inequities in outcomes here in Douglas County than in many places.”
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Contact: Hannah Lemon, KU Edwards Campus, 913-897-8755, [email protected], @KUEdwardsCampus
KU offering new online maintenance, warehouse layout training
OVERLAND PARK — The COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies and universities to revisit how to receive and deliver necessary training to professionals. Without location as a factor, University of Kansas Lifelong & Professional Education (LPE) pivoted hands-on, in-person training to online delivery. This allows top instructors to work with the university to train individuals around the world, increasing the diversity of peers, flexibility of training options and access to opportunities.
As supply chains were strained over the past year and a half, the need for a well-organized warehouse and well-trained supervisors was magnified. LPE answered with expanded online, self-paced certifications and courses in maintenance management, supply chain, logistics, technology management, project management and more.
“We enjoy seeing everyone together in person, but the increase in access and accommodation, especially for technology and logistics – two critical areas heightened by the pandemic – allows professionals around the world to be trained by top leaders in their field without having to travel,” said Kevin Curry, technology management program manager for LPE.
Over the past 15 years, hundreds of professionals have completed programs such as the Certificate in Systematic Layout Planning for Lean Facilities, Certificate in Warehouse and Distribution Center Layout and Lean Six Sigma.
Longstanding partnerships with industry help ensure classes are relevant and applicable to real-world scenarios. This includes the 63-year partnership between Richard Muther & Associates and LPE. Current president and owner Lee Hales, who’s based out of Atlanta, has been teaching warehouse layout courses for LPE off and on since 1975. A graduate of KU and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prolific industrial planning author, Hales has consulted with companies including Amazon, Caterpillar, General Motors, Ford, Coca-Cola, The Container Store and many more.
Hales teaches courses in Certificate in Systematic Layout Planning (SLP) for Lean Facilities and the Certificate in Warehouse and Distribution Center Layout. He is the co-author of Systematic Layout Planning (SLP) 4th edition. More than 400 individuals around the globe have completed the warehouse and distribution center certificate alone.
Training maintenance professionals around the world is commonplace for instructor Joel Levitt, who’s been with KU for nine years and recently helped launch the new Certificate in Leadership Skills for Maintenance Supervisors and Managers. Over his 35 years of experience, he’s trained more than 20,000 maintenance leaders from 3,000 organizations in 39 countries, and he has written nearly 20 maintenance management texts on the topic.
“Online courses give unprecedented access for people to gain this kind of training, especially in the maintenance world,” Levitt said. “Every factory or big facility in the U.S. has a maintenance supervisor. They are the key players in the effectiveness of maintenance, and there’s very little out there for them as far as needed, specialized training. These courses are important in helping to fill this gap.”
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