Grant Program: COVID-19 Response Grant

Carey Gleason, PhD, associate professor, Department of Medicine, and co-principal investigators Maria Mora Pinzon, MD, MS, assistant scientist, Department of Medicine, and Melissa Metoxen, senior student services coordinator at the Native American Center for Health Professions were awarded a COVID-19 Response grant for utilizing social media and community advocates to address health consequences of COVID-19 in Black, Latinx and American Indian communities. The overarching goal of this project is to continue disseminating accurate information created by community advocates through social media about COVID-19 and evaluate the effectiveness of social media messages on changing beliefs, attitudes, and adoption of behaviors related to COVID-19 and vaccination.

Menikanaehkem, a grassroots organization based on the Menominee Reservation in Northeast Wisconsin, will use its grant to help build behavioral, social and hands-on skills for youth as they learn about their native language and cultures, and nature-based healing and resilience. This project promotes mental, physical, spiritual and emotional wellness through practices that are traditional to the Menominee tribal people.

A grant to La Crosse County will support an expansion and enhancement of the La Crosse System of Care (SOC) to address the social and emotional health of adolescents most impacted by the pandemic, specifically the community’s Black youth. The grant builds upon the La Crosse SOC, a partnership between the School District of La Crosse and County, intended to provide interventions and supports to keep youth mentally healthy, safe from abuse and neglect and prevent arrests for behaviors that are often rooted in mental health or other complex needs. With the addition of two part-time Community Cultural Liaisons contracted through a local, Black-led non-profit agency, Hope Restores, this project aims to create opportunities to connect meaningfully with youth impacted by COVID-19, increase culturally responsive services and train parents and caregivers on skills to support the social and emotional needs of their families.

Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health has received a grant to expand its successful Providers and Teens Communicating for Health (PATCH) Youth Advocacy Fellowship model to include a statewide group of young people ages 12-21. This project aims to empower youth to be advocates for themselves and their peers, offer a space to tell their stories, and value their experiences while also ensuring youth voice is present in existing and future adolescent social and emotional health initiatives.

GSAFE, an organization working to create school communities where all LGBTQ youth and students thrive, has received a grant to deliver critically needed social-emotional supports to some of the most vulnerable adolescents in Wisconsin. This project aims to support BIPOC, Trans, Nonbinary LGBTQ+ adolescents impacted by COVID-19 through new programs and resources that expand pathways to youth leadership and increase educators’ ability to provide affirming and inclusive classrooms and schools.

National Alliance on Mental Illness Southeast Wisconsin, Inc (NAMI SEWI), was awarded a grant to adapt and expand the capacity of the “Compassion Resilience Toolkit,” a resource for parents and caregivers supporting youth with mental health needs. In partnership with Rogers Behavioral Health, this project will establish caregiver groups and facilitator trainings, to create psychologically safe spaces for skill development and resilience building. As a result, parents and caregivers will have the tools to minimize compassion fatigue and increase their ability to support their children facing mental health challenges as they move through and beyond the pandemic. In addition, the team will partner with Milwaukee’s Core El Centro to recruit Spanish-speaking parents/caregivers to train as group facilitators.

Filiz Yesilkoy, PhD, assistant professor, UW–Madison College of Engineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering, and co-principal investigators Irene Ong, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Miriam Shelef, MD, PhD, associate professor, Department of Medicine are developing a user-friendly, cost-effective, point-of-care serology test for monitoring protective immunity against COVID-19. By developing this biosensor platform, investigators will be able to assess vaccination status, past-infection status and protective immunity to inform communities in Wisconsin of the risk of COVID-19.

Dr. Michael Fiore, professor of medicine and UW Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention (UW-CTRI) director, and researchers at UW-CTRI are using a $300,000 COVID-19 Response Grant from the Wisconsin Partnership Program to better understand the course, treatments and outcomes of COVID-19 and provide insights to improve the monitoring and treatment of future novel disease outbreaks. UW-CTRI has been leading the COVID Electronic Health Records (EHR) Cohort at the University of Wisconsin (CEC-UW). CEC-UW is using de-identified EHR data from COVID-19 patients across 21 participating health systems across the country, enabling the project to link demographic, medical history, and clinical data to COVID-19 severity and outcomes. A grant from the Wisconsin Partnership Program supports the analysis of data, including the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 among racial and ethnic minorities and vulnerable populations, comparing Wisconsin to the rest of the nation, including African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanics and patients diagnosed with depression and anxiety.

Rachel Gicquelais, PhD, assistant professor, UW–Madison School of Nursing, and co-principal investigator Ryan Westergaard, MD, PhD, MPH, associate professor, Department of Medicine, are using a COVID-19 Response grant to address the dual epidemics of COVID-19 and drug overdose. With a focus on rural Wisconsin residents, the goal of this project is to understand patterns of overdose risk, COVID-19 vaccine willingness and related attitudes and behaviors. Investigators will also test a novel mobile health intervention to support vaccine uptake in people who inject drugs.

To improve health and racial equity in Milwaukee County, Sheri Johnson, PhD, Director of the UW Population Health Institute and associate professor at the Department of Population Health Sciences, and co-principal investigators Wajiha Akhtar, PhD, MPH, assistant director and associate scientist at the Population Health Institute and Paula Tran Inzeo, MPH, director of MATCH at the Population Health Institute are analyzing data relating to the county’s disbursement of COVID-19 funding in 2020. This project aims to evaluate the effectiveness of investments and distribution of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act federal COVID-19 funds by Milwaukee County, and further increase the effectiveness by implementing a racial and health equity framework.