In 2020-2023, while attending the Adelphi University School of Social Work and working as a graduate research assistant on the Photovoice Participatory Action Research Team for two and a half years, I Led the concept, design, curation, installation, and exhibition project management of the “Café Photovoice Permanent Participant Exhibition” at the Bowen Center in Harlem, NY. I also designed an built the corresponding “Café Photovoice Virtual Exhibition” website. In these leadership roles, I experienced a dynamic social work professional identity integration across the micro/mezzo/macro continuum in public health social work. Through the Photovoice methodology, I engaged with core social work values and ethics with vulnerable populations by co-knowledge building through emergent arts-based research and utilizing technology as an immersive advocacy tool to amplify the voices of vulnerable community members amongst us.

As an artist, I understand aesthetics, my neurodiversity provides me with visionary attunement, and as an MSW student practitioner, I engaged with symbolic interactionist theory within community member interviews, check-ins, and artwork facilitations. These concepts merged as participants were given community leadership awards and experienced seeing their photographed lived experiences presented as gallery art objects.

Dissemination successes include the Bowen Center wanting the Café Photovoice exhibition permanently installed as part of their existing legacy art collection that is free and open to the public. In April, 2022, the Adelphi University School of Social Work, social work researchers and the Bowen Center publicly marketed and promoted the exhibition’s opening reception, and the Harlem community stakeholders attended. In October, 2022, I led the research teams’ webinar tour of the virtual exhibition website. Bowen clinicians and staff, Adelphi students, and professors attended. In December 2022, two Café Photovoice participants agreed to special interviews to discuss their artworks as part of a specially produced 10-minute video for the Bowen Center annual fundraising gala in New York City. The research team and Bowen Center collaborated on how the Café Photovoice virtual exhibition facilitates ongoing community engagement. Furthermore, as part of a clinical social work practice innovation through technologies, the researchers and Bowen discussed digital storytelling potentialities and moving toward using Photovoice digital photography methodology as an ongoing therapeutic art in public health intervention. The Bowen Center plans to engage other cohorts of Photovoice participants post 2023. Bowen and the researchers discussed that the next phase of the community partnership grant world focus on integrating https://cafephotovoice.org/ into the Bowen Center’s community services through psychoeducation, therapeutic intervention, health literacy, community engagement, agency training, advocacy, stakeholder engagement, and policy discourse.

Designed and built frontend and backend virtual Café Photovoice Permanent Participant Exhibition website cafephotovice.org, which continues to serve as a clinician and staff patient-centered training tool, as well as a therapeutic intervention, community outreach and education platform.