Project Title: Visual Narratives to Facilitate Immigrant/Refugee Family Mental Health Literacy, Support, and Resilience.

Project Leaders: Sahra Abdi (UWEAST), Brian Goldfarb (UC San Diego), and Amina Sheik Mohamed (UC San Diego)

Letters of Support:

• Kevin Patrick, MD, MS , is is a Professor of Family and Preventive Medicine in the UC San Diego School of Medicine. He is also the Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems in UCSD’s Qualcomm Institute/Calit2. He is Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Health Data Exploration Project. His research, funded by the NIH, NSF, CDC and RWJF, is focused on improving the use of information and communication technology to measure and improve health-related behaviors of individuals and populations. For 20 years (1994-2013) Dr. Patrick served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine and he has served on the Secretary’s Council for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and on the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board.
  
  
• Steve Eldred, Program Manager, The California Endowment. Founded in 1996, the California Endowment is a private, California-focused health foundation[1] that advocates for health and health equity, and raises awareness of how and where health can happen. The Endowment does this by fighting to expand access to affordable, quality health care for underserved communities, and investing in fundamental improvements for the health of all Californians.
  
  
• Zara Marselian, MA, FACHE is CEO of La Maestra Community Health Centers and La Maestra Foundation. She founded La Maestra to provide healthcare and social services to help the underserved, immigrant and refugee residents in the inner-city San Diego community of City Heights to become healthy and self-sufficient. Since 1990, La Maestra has grown into a nationally-recognized organization with 400 staff serving over 45,000 patients annually, with locations across San Diego County. In her commitment to share innovative, replicable approaches to addressing needs of underserved communities, Zara initiates and participates in many local, national and global collaboratives. Her expertise includes cultural diversity and social determinants of health and their impacts on low income, immigrant/refugee, public housing residents, women and older adults; innovative healthcare and social service delivery models such as telehealth and peer promotora programs; constructing a green health center; diversifying funding streams for nonprofits; developing partnerships with community-based organizations; promoting healing through art, and economic empowerment through peer microlending and social enterprise; and medical-legal-social services integration.

• Brian Selznick, is Illustrator and Author of Award winning books including #1 New York Times Bestseller, Wonderstruck; California Young Readers Medal (2000) winner, Riding Freedom; and Caldecott Medal winner, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was adapted for the film Hugo (2011) directed by Martin Scorcese.