Youth in Motion: Sunset Kayak

Alaya Eveland, Other Undergraduate Student

College of Professional Studies

My project is an event that celebrates how outdoor recreation can connect youth to the land, to our communities, and ourselves. This will be a free private kayaking event at the Humboldt Bay Aquatic Center on May 6th, and aims to support transition age foster youth through a free community building experience. All transportation, gear, and food will be provided at no cost to the participants, and will be funded by various grants and donations from our stakeholders. The event will be hosted by Center Activities at Cal Poly Humboldt and California Youth Connections, and will be open to members of Elite Scholars and the Humboldt County Transition Age Youth Committee (HCTAYC).

Youth Outdoor Resilience-Building Experiences Pilot: Planning, Implementation and Program Evaluation with Big Lagoon School

College of Professional Studies

During the academic year 2018-2019, Big Lagoon School was awarded a grant from the Alexander T. Salvos & Timothy A. Salvos Fund for Youth of Humboldt Area Foundation, which provided the opportunity to formalize the Outdoor Resilience-Building Experiences pilot program, an intervention for creatively addressing the need for more behavioral and social-emotional supports with youth in rural schools. This was an IRB-approved study measuring student resilience outcomes with self-regulation skills, mindfulness, and empowering access to the county's natural surroundings for participants grades 4-7. Findings will help the program test effectiveness and sustainability.

Youth Voices Matter

Lori Hayes, Social Work Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

In partnership with the Yurok Tribe, this project seeks the opinions of Yurok extended foster care and aged-out foster youth about their experiences, their needs, and their opinions on how services can be improved and ideas for future programing for Tribal foster youth. This project will produce a report that highlights common themes found in the interviews, insightful input and ideas for improvement provided by the participants. As the ICWA Department and the Tribal Court continue to design programing for youth and refine existing programs, the hope is that this final report will provide useful information that will help them in program design and improvements over time.

Yurok Wellness Court Professional Training

Madalene Easterbrook , Social Work Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

Our finished project is a recorded video training, approximately one hour long. We gave a copy of the training to the Yurok Wellness Court. We also gave a copy of the slides to the Yurok Wellness Court, so that they may conduct their own live training using our materials.

“I See Gay People”: Gaydar Abilities in a Real-World Distribution

College of Professional Studies

Previous research suggests that people can accurately identify a person’s sexual orientation from facial cues alone. Many of these studies have relied on images collected from various online sources that may contain other contextual cues to sexual orientation. Additionally, heterosexual and homosexual individuals are typically presented using a 50/50 distribution, which does not accurately reflect the real-world distribution of faces we encounter. This study aims to investigate whether people are more accurate at identifying sexual orientation from facial cues when the distribution of images presented more accurately reflects the real world distribution of straight and gay faces.

“The sense of solidarity”: Relational ethics, peer support, and specialized resources for rural and Indigenous social work education program alumni

Calla Peltier-Olson, Social Work Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

Humboldt Social Work Alumni experience unique challenges and exhibit particular strengths as a virtue of the unique focus of the Program and the context of the rural & Indigenous communities served. I assessed how alumni’s sustainability in the field might be bolstered, and how their education impacted their practice/values. I facilitated a focus group of graduating Master’s students and an online survey open to all alumni, and translated the data into recommendations. I used Indigenous MMR, combining quantitative data, thematic analysis, & relational epistemology. I recommend the creation of a decentralized alumni organization, drawing from other postcolonial-education-focused alumni orgs.