Last year, with funding from the Gephardt Institute’s St. Louis Impact Fund, three students at the WashU School of Medicine hosted a series of workshops aimed at helping seniors take a more active role in their own health and well-being.
Transform Grants are part of the St. Louis Impact Fund, a Gephardt Institute initiative that aims to catalyze and support mutually beneficial relationships between WashU students and community organizations, ultimately advancing efforts critical to community needs.
Each grant provides up to $10,000 to students partnering with local non-profit or civic organizations that they have engaged with extensively. Projects — which can either be new initiatives or the expansion of pre-existing ones — must have clearly defined outcomes and the goal of advancing regional priorities.
In 2024, a Transform Grant was allocated to occupational therapy students Noemi Rojas-Serrano OTD ’26, Hannah Launius OTD/S ‘26, Mia Pearce OTD/S ’25, and Talia Ben-Yosef OTD/S ‘27, who developed “PromOting Healthy Living Workshops” at the Northside Youth and Senior Service Center alongside WashU’s Chapter of the Coalition of Therapy Advocates for Diversity.
We were inspired by the impact these group sessions had, both for the students to apply their course knowledge and for the seniors to be more engaged in their own health and well-being.” — Mia Pearce OTD/S ’25
“The PromOting Healthy Living Workshops created a series of opportunities for Northside community members which both increased and sustained impact. By providing more than one workshop, this team leaned into best practices in community engagement by planning for long-term impact rather than one-time engagements,” said Sam Babb, Associate Director for Community Engagement at the Gephardt Institute.
The project comprised 10 workshops led by Occupational Therapy students.
“Previous workshops delivered to Northside Youth and Senior Service Center provided students with the opportunity to practice their clinical skills and work with community groups, but we wanted a way to facilitate more frequent engagement with the Center and address the seniors’ interests and activity performance concerns,” said Pearce and Launius in a report. “In this way, we felt that this was an opportunity to build a lasting partnership to promote health and well-being at the population level.”
One workshop, which happened in September 2024, was called “Let’s Talk About It: Leisure and Social Participation.” Through this introductory workshop, the Northside seniors defined what leisure and social participation mean to them, identified ways to engage in these occupations, and shared how being social and participating in activities they enjoy can add value to their lives. The workshop aimed to help seniors learn more about Occupational Therapy services and gain an understanding of how health goes beyond basic needs like food and physical activity.
A second workshop, titled “Let’s Talk About Mental Health and Well-being,” occurred in October 2024 and asked Northside seniors to discuss what mental health and well-being mean to them, factors that can affect their mental health and well-being, and strategies they use to promote positive mental health and well-being.
“We hope that the seniors are able to build their confidence and their sense of community by being a part of the PromOTing Healthy Living Program,” said Launius. “Although the seniors already know each other well, we incorporate group education and discussion questions into each of our workshops. We encourage sharing amongst the group in the hope that individuals can learn from each other’s lived experiences and strategies.”
Other workshops emphasized topics ranging from how to prevent falls to how to stay healthy during the holiday season. They provided seniors a chance to reimagine what health and well-being look like, while also building a support system among their peers and occupational therapy students
“We were inspired by the impact these group sessions had, both for the students to apply their course knowledge and for the seniors to be more engaged in their own health and well-being,” said Pearce. “Through the Transform Grant funding, we hoped for the opportunity to make these group sessions more consistent to supplement students’ learning, strengthen rapport with a community partner, and overall enhance community well-being.”
“The success of this program illustrates the power of partnerships between students and community organizations to create sustainable, long-term programming with real, tangible benefits for community members,” Babb said.
The St. Louis Impact Fund is supported by the Office of the Provost and generous donations to the Gephardt Institute. Since 2008, the Gephardt Institute has distributed over $320,000 in grants through the St. Louis Impact Fund and former Civic Engagement Fund, to advance student civic engagement and St. Louis regional priorities. If you would like to make a gift to support the St. Louis Impact Fund, please click here or contact Stephanie Kurtzman, Executive Director of the Gephardt Institute, at GephardtAdvancement@wustl.edu.