The Empowerment and Participatory Approaches to Building Agency Evaluation Capacity project aims to strengthen evaluation capacity for mental health, substance use disorder, and developmental disability service agencies in Champaign County, fostering a culture of continuous improvement through participatory and empowerment approaches.

This collaborative project—Building the Next Generation of Engaged Researchers: Utilizing Youth Participatory Action Research to Engage Teens in Community Policy Change—across researchers at Illinois, UIC, and Extension aims to build research and policy skills and attitudes among youth ages 13-18 to inform local and state programs and policies impacting young people.

Mental health struggles, body image issues, incidents of bullying—these are just some of the topics that groups of high school students in Champaign-Urbana and Danville, Ill., are currently exploring as their collective research interest.

The COVID-19 Thorns & Silver Linings for Mental Health & Vaccine Uptake: A Mixed-Method Study project provides an evidence base for how families, youth, and child care providers have coped with COVID-19, as well as how they will continue to cope with this pandemic and adjust to it.

The Optimizing a Mindful Intervention for Urban Minority Youth via Stress Physiology study investigates how mindfulness practices (breathing, meditation) beneficially impact stress physiology of underlying externalizing behaviors among low-income, largely minority adolescents relative to health education programming.

This project implements a mindful movement program among preschool-aged children to teach emotional regulation and coping skills.