Public Health Portfolio
Jacqueline has over ten years of professional, research, counseling, and teaching experience in academic and public health institutions that investigate contemporary issues in public and urban health, incarceration, HIV/AIDS, gentrification, substance use, mental health, and the delivery of patient-centered care–where the goal is to promote positive health and biopsychosocial outcomes.
Jacquline has consulted numerous community leaders, public health advocates, and students at the University of California, San Francisco, Stanford University School of Medicine, University of San Francisco, and community-based organizations on the full spectrum of research from idea, design, recruitment, data collective, analysis, and dissemination. For collaboration or consultation, please contact Jacqueline. The four areas of Jacqueline's research portfolio are below.
Housing Justice: Anti-Displacement and Eviction
Jacqueline's most current research examined the social, health, mental, and environmental impacts of living in public housing among residents and their experiences of undergoing citywide policy implementations of privatized redevelopment or renovation. For the last three years, she nurtured relationships alongside residents in the various public housing sites, held community outreach, joined residents on photo storytelling walks, conducted qualitative interviews with residents about their hopes and dreams, struggles and triumphs, perceptions of health, community, home, and safety, and their views and/or concerns about the transition. She led ethnographic mapping observations of the availability and accessibility of resources (food, health, social services, public transportation, parks) in each neighborhood and surrounding area, and held interviews with social service, healthcare providers, and community advocates on their perceptions of the transition and policy recommendations. The hope of the study is to present findings to city officials to improve health and social outcomes among public housing residents and the way in which care and resources are delivered to better serve the community and protect families from displacement.
HIV and STI Prevention
Jacqueline's spent close to 7 years on HIV and STI prevention initiatives that investigated ways to advance positive health practices and preventative care for incarcerated men living with HIV and explored the HIV risks among couples impacted by incarceration, where the man had been paroled for a least a year with the same female partner prior to and at post-release.
Prison Industrial Complex
A majority of Jacqueline's research studies the impact of the prison industrial complex on the spiritual, biopsychosocial, health, and cultural outcomes among communities of color. She has worked tirelessly to implement and evaluate positive health programs that deter from incarceration and support communal care needed for one to thrive in life, health, and social networks. She has received restorative justice trainings, and spent ample time visiting jails, prisons, and juvenile justice centers as a community organizer, public health advocate, and poet, as well as attending conferences, and conducted meetings and qualitative interviews with stakeholders, community leaders, and those directly impacted by incarceration, in addition to holding community discussions—to explore alternatives to the carceral system. Jacqueline has collaborated with artists of various mediums to use music, poetry, and the arts to raise consciousness into care and action to fight against incarceration.
Education and Youth Agency
Another avenue of Jacqueline's work focuses on teaching to transgress anchored in radical love, authentic vulnerability, collective healing, and communal care—to embody critical thought, arts as resistance, grassroots organizing, and long-term kinship.
Jacqueline develops, teaches, and evaluates the yearlong Community Empowerment Activists community-engaged learning program at the University of San Francisco—for undergraduate students, who have committed their lives to fight for collective liberation. Students examine systemic oppression and movements of resistance, while developing skills in base-building, mobilizing, and grassroots organizing through internships with organizations on the frontlines of SF fighting for positive social change. Students employ scholarly-activist based research and arts as resistance using a transformative justice lens in the curriculum. The foundation is “The rEVOLution is Love”—for it is radical love of self, for the oppressed, and each other that evolves our hope that a reimagined just world that lifts Black liberation, human dignity, equity, sovereignty, and Mama Earth is possible.
Jacqueline has developed and delivered a community-centered expressive arts and healing programs for incarcerated, (in)justice youth and transitional age youth (18-24 years old). Critical resistance pedagogy is integrated into the curriculum, where the works of revolutionaries are explored and expressive arts are used to confront pain and embrace triumphs—anchored in radical love and belonging. The course delves into nature, culture, and science—while building with the community to support the youth’s interested fields of studies and prospective careers.
