Center for Public Service faculty grant awarded to creators of trans resilience project

The Center for Public Service (CPS) has announced the recipients of its 2022 CPS Faculty Community-Engaged Research Grant.

Manuel A. Ocasio and Jasper J. Privat were awarded a grant for $10,000 for their project “Community Care Is Our Own Salvation: Community-Based Resilience and Healing for Trans Communities Surviving Natural Disasters in Louisiana.”

Ocasio (he/him) is an assistant professor at the School of Medicine, and Privat (they/them) is a staff psychologist at Tulane Counseling Center as well as an adjunct assistant professor at the School of Science and Engineering.
 
The project aims to leverage and strengthen an existing partnership with a community partner, TIDAL, a trans-led coalition of community members, healthcare providers, students and teachers in the Gulf South, united in their commitment to trans liberation through equitable health care. Ocasio and Privat’s project’s goal is to develop for TIDAL an innovative workshop tailored to the transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) community that will provide practical skills to promote and teach resilience in response to a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, tornado or flooding. The workshop will fill an important gap in tailored services for TGNC patients, empower communities during crises and inform the development of future workshops that can be scaled to increase impact for other geographic regions and TGNC populations.
 
“We are thrilled about this opportunity to uplift and celebrate trans resilience and healing,” Privat said. “Two-Spirit, trans and gender non-conforming folks are more likely to experience the traumatic stress of natural disasters in the context of cumulative and traumatizing systemic challenges, such as discrimination in medical settings and isolation from networks of support. We believe this community-based, trans-led project will cultivate a healing space for the trans folks involved and beyond.”

Two-Spirit is a term from indigenous American heritage that indicates gender status is neither exclusively male nor female.

The $10,000 award will be granted over 18 months. CPS Faculty Community-Engaged Research Grants are awarded annually to faculty whose research “engages community partners in reciprocal relationships to co-produce knowledge, resulting in public value and recognizable scholarly impacts in their field(s) of inquiry.”