Earlier this year, we closed client recruitment because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the pandemic shifted community needs and priorities, we wanted to continue our primary goal of building and supporting communities. To do this, we added Phase 3, a rapid qualitative assessment of community priorities, strengths, and needs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

PHASE 3.1

We did two types of interviews. In Phase 3.1, did a COVID-19 rapid assessment by interviewing community members throughout the Gulf South. Our goal was to better understand community experiences and perspectives during COVID-19, and how community organizations were adjusting to their communities’ changing needs.

​

PHASE 3.2

In Phase 3.2, we asked members of the Community Engagement and Planning (CEP) group to participate in the COVID-19 rapid assessment and to offer their opinions of the CEP intervention. In addition to understanding the impacts of COVID-19, we wanted to know more about how participating in CEP might have impacted networking between organizations during COVID-19. We also wanted to better understand what parts of CEP worked best for participants and which could be improved on.

​

Altogether, we completed interviews with 26 people and have analyzed the results. We have written an informal report of our findings, and recently published an academic paper. Both can be found on our Publications page here. 

​

WRAPPING UP

As the C-LEARN project has come to a close, we created a booklet to summarize our study process, findings, reflect on our experiences, and offer lessons learned and policy recommendations based on what we found.