Sciacca Headlines Annual African-American Heritage Month Colloquium

Panelists and speakers at the 2019 Dr. Ethel Hall Colloquium were, from left, Audrey Ellis, coordinator of social services at Tuscaloosa City Schools; Ben Sciacca, director of Desire Street Ministries; and Rev. Tyshawn Gardner (far right), vice president for student affairs at Stillman College. Also pictured is Sherron Wilkes, MSW instructor.

The 30th annual Dr. Ethel Hall Colloquium was held on Feb. 15, 2019, with Ben Sciacca, author, educator and social justice advocate, delivering the keynote address.

The theme of this year’s colloquium was “Seeking social justice in education through community collaboration,” and Sciacca, author of “Meals from Mars: A Parable of Prejudice and Providence,” shared his experiences of strengthening communities to improve youth outcomes.

Sciacca has worked to equip young people to be peacemakers. Sciacca discussed his leadership role with Desire Street Ministries, which originated in New Orleans and partners with community leaders across multiple states, coaching and caring for them as they navigate the waters of ministry in their neighborhoods.

Sciacca, who has lived in Tuscaloosa with his wife and four children for the last 17 years, served as a teacher and principal at Restoration Academy, a small urban Christian school in Fairfield. Panelists included Audrey Ellis, coordinator of social services for Tuscaloosa City Schools, and Rev. Tyshawn Gardner, pastor of the Plum Grove Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa and the founder and CEO of the Citizen Impacting Community Association and the West Side Scholars Academy. He currently serves as the vice president for student affairs at Stillman College and is president of the Tuscaloosa Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

First graduate of MSW-JD program reflects on winding road of learning, service

By David Miller

Jilisa Milton had just completed her first summer of service with Americorps and was still searching for direction in her social work career.

It was 2012, and Milton, a University of Alabama alumna, was doing service learning with immigrants in a farmworker community in central Florida. Americorps was flexible and allowed her to serve in a variety of ways, including tutoring at a nearby high school.

Not until the next summer would Milton connect all of her life experiences, channel them into a new focus and find her way back to UA.

Milton attended a conference in 2013 and watched a video speech by Michelle Alexander, a civil rights attorney who specializes in mass incarceration in the United States.

Alexander’s message resonated deeply with Milton, who went through foster care before being raised by her grandparents and moving to Birmingham at age 7.

“[Alexander’s video] brought a lot of things full circle for me – how I ended up in foster care, the war on drugs, and how mass incarceration affects other things in my family’s life,” Milton said. “I remember seeing that video and thinking, ‘I want to be like her.’ So I started to research that particular sector of law.”

When Milton returned for her second year of Americorps, she convinced her supervisor to allow her to work as a domestic violence court advocate. Milton’s undergraduate social work degree from UA bolstered her credentials for the role, and for her law school applications that she would begin submitting. Milton would eventually choose the School of Law at UA over Howard University and would enroll in the MSWJD program after fulfilling a Fulbright Award and teaching English in Indonesia.

“What made it hard for me was I knew Howard had a lot of social justice components, but I knew so much about being here at UA, how much it will cost to live and the community I had created,” Milton said. “And the (UA) law school worked with me in a really intentional way, so that’s when I decided to come back home.”

During UA commencement exercises held May 4-5, 2019 Milton became the first student to earn a MSW-JD degree at UA, culminating four years of preparation for the growing need for trauma-informed lawyers. In that span, Milton has also interned and worked with the Adelante Alabama Worker Center and the Equal Justice Initiative. She also joined the law school’s domestic violence clinic. Through these experiences, Milton said it was normal to encounter situations where her trauma-informed background was needed to mitigate situations of sexual assault or abuse victims. As such, she was continually motivated to continue the dual-track degree.

“When I worked at the EJI, I thought I’d want to do a bunch of legal stuff,” Milton said. “But I was the one that they wanted to do re-entry and work with those clients. I thought, ‘oh, you needed that?’ ... they realized it was necessary and complementary. And there are so many avenues that I didn’t realize – working with children as a GAL (Guardian ad Litem) or doing mitigation work – require a lot of psychological understanding. But

there are also things centered around policy, which requires you to think about systems and how they work in people’s lives.

“Employers, especially in a legal setting, respond well to having [a MSW-JD] degree.”

Milton’s passion is restorative justice and reforming the criminal justice system. She hopes one day to create and lead an entity to facilitate that. Her experiences in the MSW-JD program – understanding trauma, how prisons work and program development – have provided a base to work toward her goal. Milton will now begin advocating for children in the Black Belt region of the state, focusing on mental health as it relates to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Though Milton was initially nervous about being the pilot student for the MSW-JD program, she’s thankful for the flexibility she was afforded in tailoring her curriculum and in choosing field placements. The interdisciplinary aspect of her degree gave her an invaluable “ground-level” perspective to better connect both realms, she said.

“That overlap allows you to see what clients are going through, and lawyers can now feel like they can tap into that and help,” Milton said. “You’ll know how people think, and you’ll move in a different way to connect things better.

Trauma-informed lawyering is an emerging concept that lawyers are starting to care about, especially the ones that do direct work. I’m better for it now, and I encourage other students to enter the program.”

UA to Implement Telehealth Network to Combat Opioids in Alabama

By David Miller

University of Alabama researchers are working to address opioid-related morbidity and mortality in four Alabama counties by developing a community care network to strengthen prevention, treatment and recovery.

The Health Resources and Services Administration has awarded a UA-led team of researchers and community stakeholders a $200,000 grant to implement an integrative tele-health network.

The network will be used by a multidisciplinary team from UA with health and education community partners in Franklin, Marion, Winston and Walker counties. Opioid abuse and misuse are nationwide crises. The U.S. Department for Health and Human Services estimated in 2017 that 130 people die each day from opioid-related overdoses and that 11.4 million people misused prescription opioids. The opioid crisis is magnified in Alabama, which has the nation’s highest per capita opioid prescription rate and saw 5,128 overdoses from 2006 through 2014.

The project, titled, “Development of an Integrated Care TeleECHO Model for Opioid Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery in Rural Alabama,” will improve prevention, treatment and recovery of substance use disorder and opioid use disorder by focusing on “whole-person care,” a community health concept that coordinates health, behavioral health and social services for more efficient and effective patient outcomes.

“Unfortunately, while there’s a really high risk of opioid-related mortality or morbidity in these counties, there are almost no facilities or programs specifically for opioid problems,” said Dr. Hee Yun Lee, principal investigator and UA professor of social work (MPI, Dr. Joshua Eyer). “In this grant, we will identify the gaps and urgent needs of services or policies we must establish.”

The primary focus of the one-year grant is to assess various levels of care and support and to recommend changes for a three-year, $1 million implementation HRSA grant. Should researchers receive the next phase of funding, they’ll work with community partners to build-out services and direct-care improvements.

The “planning grant” sets the table for that stage, and though UA researchers aren’t providing new services over the next year, they’re enhancing existing services through TeleECHO, a relatively new care model that will allow existing providers to consult with experts, share their challenges and solutions, and expand behavioral health services in the four counties.

TeleECHO allows clinicians in the communities to use video and teleconferencing technology to connect with other care providers and researchers to discuss patient cases and better determine treatment. The model helps providers maintain a more efficient and effective care network in typically underserved areas.

This model helps better leverage existing partnerships in communities, including the Capstone Rural Health Center in Walker County, which will serve as the TeleEcho hub. The Capstone Rural Health Center is partnered with UA’s Capstone College of Nursing on a three-year HRSA grant to implement behavioral health services at its clinic.

“Existing services are scarce, but there are people there doing incredibly important work,” said Dr. Joshua Eyer, multi-principal investigator and assistant professor of nursing at UA. “TeleECHO is an affordable way to improve the expertise of the providers that are doing the work.”

Researchers point to another care concept – “nonjudgmental” pathways to treatment – that will have tangible effects during the grant period. Eyer described the pathway as “treating the

Dr. Hee Yun Lee is leading an multidisciplinary team of researchers at UA.

whole community,” as opioid misuse and abuse is a symptom of broader healthcare and financial problems that affect many people in those communities. “In developing a culture that’s free of stigma, it will allow community members to freely help each other and come up with ideas for how to work together,” Lee said.

Researchers began the study with an analysis of public health data in the four counties and conducted individual interviews, focus groups and surveys in late 2019. They also formed a strategic partnership with Alabama Senator Greg Reed, who has helped organize town hall meetings where researchers can present preliminary findings to community members and “research the problem together,” Lee said.

“We’re raising more awareness, as well as prevention and treatment strategies,” she said. “Senator Reed told us that he is committed to fighting the opioid problem.”

Researchers have also partnered with the Walker Area Community Foundation, area law enforcement and the United States Attorney’s Office of North Alabama. Lee said she hopes to partner with school systems in the four counties to do prevention and awareness movements and intervention programs.