Project Vision:

We strive to develop a community-driven program that empowers racial/ethnic under-resourced people who are under-represented in medicine to transform their and the medical communities towards social and health justice.

We partnered with the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and the David Geffen School of Medicine to support and broaden a Participatory Action Research project to include a novel collaboration with Horace Mann UCLA Community School and Saving Hearts Foundation to develop a Wellness Collaborative for Research & Education Activities to Transform and Empower (WeCREATE).

WeCREATE is a transdisciplinary model for research, education, and practice and serves as the locus for a comprehensive cross-generations cross-grades –middle & high school, UCLA Undergraduate and Graduate students, Cardiologists, and Medical trainee research, education, and service program.

The Heart Clinic

As part of multi-prog activities, the Heart Clinic starts as a service component with comprehensive primary prevention toward reducing cardiovascular disease. Screening and prevention activities are designed to become integrated into the family life of school students.

Our first Clinic ran on November 5th, 2022.  The Heart Clinic takes place twice a year

UCLA Undergraduate Course Series

Undergraduate Course Series AY 2024-25 Scholars We have been developing a Undergraduate (UG)

course sequence to involve UG students in a community-engaged research and service associated with the

WeCREATE. The two courses that can be taken as a sequence or separately, one in the Fall and one in the

Spring quarters follow the biannual schedule of the Heart Clinic.

The course series are trained in research and can support Mann students in engaging in community based

Youth Participatory Action Research projects. This series was awarded the 2023 UCLA Chancellor’s

Award for Community-Engaged.

Summer/afterschool programs

We expect to engage Mann school students in ethnographic research to explore 1) Hospital life (e.g., Who

works there besides doctors and nurses, understand the different professionals needed to run a caring

hospital, understand how a work-day in the hospital develops) and 2) Laboratory life ( e.g., get to know

the people in a medical lab and find out what a medical lab looks like, how biomedical researchers work

together, how they train their students). The intent of these projects is to build and extend their relations to