Mirna Troncoso-Sawyer, New Director of HHD’s Institute for Community Health and Wellbeing
This spring, Mirna Troncoso-Sawyer, faculty in Health Sciences/Public Health, became the new Director of the Institute for Community Health and Wellbeing in the College of Health and Human Development. We asked her for some insight into next steps for the Institute:
We are planning to conduct a community needs assessment in the next months (probably not until late summer).
We are compiling needs assessments conducted by local hospitals in the last 2-3 years to help understand what areas of health and wellbeing are already tracked and what’s known. We have been in conversations with different community partners about questions of interest for the assessment.
And we will be recruiting interns from different majors to help us outline our assessment protocol and then of course we will need boots on the ground to administer short surveys and recruit community members for focus groups.
Faculty and internship coordinators interested in this project should reach out to me. We want to know: who is the community, how is the community doing, what are the main health concerns in the community, and how else can CSUN faculty and students contribute to improving health and wellbeing.