Threading the pearls of your necklace: how every experience builds your public health career, with Dr. Vinu Ilakkuvan, DrPH, MPH

Have you ever found yourself at a career crossroads, contemplating a leap into uncharted territory? Join us as we navigate the captivating realm of public health careers with Dr. Vinu Ilakkuvan. She shares her remarkable shift from engineering to public health, shedding light on the serendipitous ways that one's professional journey can unfold. We discuss the strategic reframing of skills that allow for such shifts, and the interplay between work experience and academic learning. Our dialogue unveils the empowering process of aligning personal values with professional ambitions, leading to a career that's not just a job but a calling. 


You’ll Learn

• Vinu’s experience transitioning from biomedical engineering to public health early in her career vs. pivoting from one role to another later on 
• Vinu’s various job roles and what she learned from each one
• How Vinu’s passion for working in an interconnected public health environment and bridging policy and ground work led to the creation of PoP Health
• What PoP Health is and how they improve public health by collaborating with coalitions to facilitate community access
• Reflecting on your own career experiences and gaining confidence to form your own story and work towards your dream job

Today’s Guest

Vinu Ilakkuvan, DrPH, MSPH, is passionate about strengthening community-driven efforts to address the upstream, root drivers of health (pophealthllc.com/tedx). She is Founder and Principal Consultant of PoP Health, a public health consulting practice that partners with community coalitions and collaboratives to transform health in their communities through policy and systems change (pophealthllc.com). PoP Health helps coalitions engage in community collaboration, action planning, participatory evaluation, and effective storytelling. PoP Health also issues a biweekly newsletter, Community Threads, with tools and strategies for anyone seeking to improve community health (pophealthllc.com/newsletter). 

Vinu received her DrPH in Health Behavior from the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health as a Milken Scholar, a Master’s degree with a concentration in Health Communication from the Harvard School of Public Health, and Bachelor’s degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Economics from the University of Virginia. She currently serves as a Professorial Lecturer at George Washington University. Vinu began her public health career coordinating the Virginia Department of Health's bullying and youth violence prevention program and later, evaluating the national truth antismoking campaign and managing policy and communications projects at Trust for America’s Health.

Resources

• Connect with Vinu on LinkedIn 
• Learn more about the Truth Initiative 
• Learn more about Trust for America's Health 
• Learn more about PoP Health 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Think of your careers as like pearls on a necklace that you're collecting, as opposed to something like a ladder right, and I've always loved that, because it's exactly what you're saying. Every experience is valuable, and just because you're pivoting and going to do something else doesn't negate your experience.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to PH Spotlight, a community for you to build your public health career with. Join us weekly right here and I'll be here too your host, sujani Siva from PH Spot. Hi, vinu, and welcome back actually to the podcast, because I think our listeners will have heard the episode you me and Leah recorded from just like self-employment in public health, and I really wanted to hear about your journey. And here we are, the two of us chatting about that.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for having me and, yes, happy to be here, awesome and.

Speaker 2: 1:04

I think the other piece that you and I mutually felt excited about is that we're both, you know, south Asian and women in public health, which was also, you know, really nice for me to just connect with somebody who has very similar roots to me, so this will be a fun combo, for sure. Okay, so one of my favorite questions, and one that often kick starts this conversation, is how people discovered public health and that this field exists, and I saw, when I was preparing for this, that you actually started off your studies in like engineering. How does one go from wanting to pursue engineering to then like discovering public health?

Speaker 1: 1:46

Everything was accidental in my interest in engineering as well as in public health. I know it always cracks me up. I feel like at some point in the future I feel like you'll start getting different answers to this question, in the sense of you know it cracks me up, like especially after COVID you know, people know that public health exists and is a field and have like some sense of what it is.

Speaker 1: 2:09

But when I was in college I quite literally did not know that public health was a field or what it was. Even my interest in engineering didn't really start out as an interest in engineering per se. I was interested. I was actually interested in both journalism and biology.

Speaker 1: 2:25

It was actually like which one of these do I want to do in college and ultimately sort of a little bit of practicality winning out and being like, well, writing and journalism I can always do. You know, on the side, maybe like major wise, I'll go biology route. And just you know, family friend randomly was like, oh, if you're going to do biology, like think about doing biomedical engineering, because the classes will be a lot smaller. And that was literally the extent of my rationale. I was like, oh, that sounds great, I'll do that. And then sort of found myself in engineering school with everything that that entails. But I actually loved engineering academically. I've always, you know, liked math and numbers and whatever. So it was. It was a very good fit and interesting academically. But I quickly realized, you know, I was in biomedical engineering and I'm like, okay, I don't really want to be in a lab pipetting things all day, I don't really want to be in front of a computer modeling things like. And I was quickly running out of. I was like there are no career options here that actually appealed to me. So what do I do? And was trying to figure out.

Speaker 1: 3:30

I was still at that point, you know, was writing for the college newspaper, so still sort of had a foot in like the journalism, writing, communications arena. I was giving tours of the university. I've always really enjoyed public speaking, so I was kind of trying to figure out how do I merge these things that I like doing with my interest in health and medicine. I was also starting to get more exposed to and interested in sort of like broader societal implications of, you know, of technology and engineering is the way it was introduced to us in engineering school. But yeah, I did the engineering school at the University of Virginia, where I went, had a science, technology and policy internship program and so I did that.

Speaker 1: 4:10

Internship was in DC for the summer and it really just kind of became clear that this was kind of the direction that spoke to my combination of interests.

Speaker 1: 4:24

And then I randomly bumped into my resident advisor on grounds one day and she was applying to mbh programs and it was like a light bulb and I was like public health, like that sounds like it could be the mix of things.

Speaker 1: 4:38

And then I I you know googled it and was like, okay, like this seems like the right mix of things that I'm interested in, and so then that is how I found public health and have been there ever since. So I actually started in public health, really interested kind of specifically in health communications because I was sort of coming at it from that, you know communications and health interest. But I feel like really just day one of my masters in public health program we had like a social epidemiology course our first year and just kind of getting oriented to the idea of these upstream drivers of health and I feel like I was immediately sold and immediately interested in much more broadly interested in public health as a field yeah, it's interesting because I I'm kind of like reflecting back to the time when I got introduced to public health and it's very similar.

Speaker 2: 5:34

You kind of know the areas that you're interested in and like what you want to do, but you can't figure out that word. And then when somebody starts telling you about, like public health and for me it was epidemiology and then you know, oh my god, that's what I want to do and you almost know, because your interests are now like matching up with this word that somebody just has introduced to you, and then like yeah, you jump on the computer and you start reading. You're like, oh my god, this is what I've been looking for. Okay, so you, you discover public health while you're still like pursuing your bachelor's. Is that right?

Speaker 2: 6:06

yeah, yeah okay, and then? What are some of your next steps from there?

Speaker 1: 6:12

Yeah, so I continued. I mean again, I was enjoying the biomedical engineering program academically so I never really considered sort of switching majors or anything at the undergrad level Also, certainly at the time at the undergrad level like there was not a public health degree to be had anyway. But I continued in biomedical engineering, but every summer. So it started with the science and technology policy internship program and then the summer after that our university had small sort of undergraduate research grants. So I applied for a research grant that was public health focused, actually looking at nutrition and related behaviors amongst those with diabetes, actually in South India, in Thumbelnato where my family is from, and it took the opportunity to do some work there one summer and then summer after that does some work again policy related, in the governor's office in Virginia. So sort of used sort of the summers to kind of explore more of this public health interest area.

Speaker 1: 7:16

And then I did apply for a master's program straight out of undergrad and went directly into a master's program for public health, which in retrospect I don't know that that is what I would do, but at the time it felt like the way to get into the field. In retrospect I later did my doctoral degree. I got a DRPH in public health part time while I was still working and also after I had worked for a few years, and at that point I feel like there was so much more I could put in context from what we were learning in class. So again, kind of looking in retrospect, sometimes I'm like if I knew everything I knew now I probably would have worked for a bit. But at the time it seems like the right thing and I do think especially for me because my undergraduate degree was not in anything related to public health. I feel like those two years in the master's program really shaped my understanding of what public health is and what areas I was most interested in.

Speaker 1: 8:20

So, it was very formative in that sense, yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:25

Something that we both said we'll chat about in today's convo was this idea of like pivoting, and sometimes I guess you think about the sunk cost, if you will, for lack of a better word, and you think let me just go through with it, especially you having invested four years into a biomedical engineering degree. That must have been a, or I'm assuming it must have been a very difficult decision to say, okay, I'm not going to go work, I'm going to go and pursue a different field where I know my interests and kind of everything I want to do is align to this degree. Can you talk a bit about what happened with you during that time and whether that was easy for you or not?

Speaker 1: 9:06

Yeah, I mean I don't know if I would say it was easy necessarily, but I will say like I don't think I had any doubts because it was very clear to me again, like in terms of what I liked doing, it was very clear that none of the traditional sort of biomedical engineering paths were going to be what I enjoyed doing. And so I feel like in that sense again, finding public health is probably one of the few like light bulb moments, and I feel like people always talk about light bulb moments and I feel like there sometimes it feels like that doesn't really happen in real life.

Speaker 1: 9:42

But I feel like this was one of the few in my life that really did feel like a light bulb moment, like oh, like this is exactly what you were saying, this is what I've been looking for and I just didn't know that this existed or this is what it was called, and in some ways I feel I mean I agree like any pivot is hard, in the sense of you feel like you've put in time and effort and energy and you know biomedical engineering degree was hard, like I always say, like I'm kind of glad I did that academically because nothing that came afterwards felt hard. But you know, after all of that, you know it does take some energy and courage and faith to like decide to make a pivot. But I find it's actually I think people struggle a lot more with pivoting further into their career. I feel like when you're whatever you've done some academic work or early in your career, I think it's a little easier. I think I've seen a lot of friends and colleagues struggle with the idea of pivoting when you're a little further into your career. And I mean this happened to me. So for several years I worked on evaluation of an anti smoking campaign and like the tobacco control and prevention world is a very specifically focused kind of arena. You know you're interacting with a lot of folks who are in the same space, going to conferences with a lot of folks in the same space. No-transcript For me.

Speaker 1: 11:08

I hit a point where I was like I don't want to be siloed, working on a specific issue. The whole appeal of public health to me was that everything was interconnected. I was intentional about I want to seek a job that is not siloed in this topical way and went about that very specifically. I think I've seen other colleagues feel similarly but feel like but I have all of these years of work experience in this space, this is my entire network Like how could I possibly pivot to something else? I think that what I tried to do, and what I always encourage other people to do and think about, is, at the end of the day, I feel like the thing that matters is what is it that you most want to do? All of your experience and skills can be framed in a way that is connected to that thing.

Speaker 1: 12:09

Of course, there are some pivots. If you have to be a medical doctor, there are certain things you have to do. That's just the nature of the game. But for a lot of us in public health, depending on what it is that you want to do, the pads are not so defined. So there's actually a lot of opportunity to pivot if that's something you want to do. So I think it's just a matter of thinking about how do I take my experiences and skills and frame it in a way that it becomes clear what translates, what can even be a value add when you have a different lens and a different perspective and you're bringing it to something new that can be really valuable. So I just think pivoting is a lot more possible than people think it is.

Speaker 2: 12:53

Yeah, and I think there's a mindset shift that has to occur at that point, because if we think that this experience would have been wasted if I move into something else, I think your ability to make that pivot becomes harder. But if you shift that to think no experience is bad experience, every experience I've had builds upon itself. And how can I use that in this new path I'm about to take?

Speaker 1: 13:23

It's such a good point, and one of my mentors once described this as like think of your careers as like pearls on a necklace that you're collecting, as opposed to something like a ladder, and I've always loved that because it's exactly what you're saying, like every experience is valuable and just because you're pivoting and going to do something else doesn't negate your experience.

Speaker 1: 13:52

We take different things and I think about this all the time with engineering in the sense of like I haven't used a differential equation since I was in college, so like one could look at that and be like, wow, what wasted time and energy that was never used again.

Speaker 1: 14:07

Right. But I feel like every problem we solve, every experience we have, it is training your brain to think. In certain ways, it is giving you a certain lens on problems. For me, engineering in particular is it's about systems and that's what public health is about too, and I feel like that connection in some ways is abstract in the sense of like my day to day work is not the things I was doing in engineering school, but I feel like that sort of way of thinking in lens is like very deep rooted in me because of sort of that engineering training and then building on that with public health. So, yeah, I really like the idea of sort of like collecting pearls on a necklace, like the experiences might not all be like directly building on top of each other, but they are all valuable and adding up to you know, a stump that's greater than it was.

Speaker 2: 15:04

Once in engineering, always an engineer, I guess. Yeah, I guess that I'm curious, like do you have a very intentional reflection period in your day or your like week? You seem to have periods when you put together the different pieces of your journey and I'm always curious to learn from everyone's kind of like reflection methodologies.

Speaker 1: 15:30

Yeah, that's such a good question. I mean not in a highly consistent or systematic way I'm not yet a journal or or you know anything like that but I like stories in all shapes and forms. I feel like that. You know, I was a dancer, a writer, tour guide, like all of these things that were ultimately about telling a story, and so I feel like I'm always trying to synthesize information into a story, and that applies to, like, my own journey in life too. So I feel like I do a lot, just sort of innately, in the way I think and process things. I do a lot of that kind of like reflection and, yeah, just storytelling. So I feel like that is where some of that comes from.

Speaker 2: 16:22

Anyway, I like that. Okay, so you go on to get an MPH degree. Where did you think you would be working when you're like pursuing your MPH degree, and is that how it all panned out?

Speaker 1: 16:36

I don't know that I really had a clear idea, to be honest, like when I was getting the degree, like I knew I really liked public health and again sort of quickly became really interested in like how do we address these upstream drivers of health. I don't know that I had a very clear sort of plan or idea or dream job or any of those things. So I was far away from home for the first time when I was doing my master's program in the summer between my first and second year. My only rationale was I wanted an internship where I could be back at home and so my parents live outside of Richmond, virginia, and Richmond is the state capital of Virginia. So I knew the state health department was there and I honestly cold emailed the chair of their injury and violence prevention department at the time I was taking actually a suicide prevention course. That just like blew my mind. I thought it was so interesting and really thinking about again those like policy systems, environmental shifts that can help us, you know, reduce something like suicide, and so cold emails the director of the injury and violence prevention department at the state health department. So I always tell people like don't try away from cold emailing. I'm not saying make it your main strategy in life, but you know sometimes it works. And so she got back to me and, you know, exchanged some emails and things and ended up interning there that summer between my first and second year of grad school.

Speaker 1: 18:20

And then, you know, when I was graduating they had a job posted for a program coordinator and I applied and that was my first job. So it was at a state health department which in that sense I feel like, was clearly like one of the public health pads that I knew existed and, you know, thought might be interesting. So I feel like I learned so much, I mean both in the internship and in the actual year plus that I worked there. I think state and local health departments are often, even as a entry level kind of person, had what felt, certainly at the time, like a lot of ownership over the particular program I was managing. So I feel like it was just an amazing opportunity to learn a lot and actually has ownership, at least in this little bubble, so I really appreciated those aspects of it. I think there are other aspects around, you know, low pay and government bureaucracy and things like that that made it hard to stick it out for very long.

Speaker 2: 19:32

And so where did kind of like the next path lead you to? Because I think you spent about a year or so in that role and then yeah, yeah, so I was there for a year.

Speaker 1: 19:42

So and again like actually really loved a lot of aspects of the work and going out. I was managing the youth violence and bullying prevention program and was going out to schools across the state on, which actually connects to some of the work I do now actually. So I've always I really appreciated being able to be out directly in communities and in different communities across the state and all of that was wonderful. I think it really was combination of just like bureaucracy and like the struggle to no-transcript implement new or different ideas and all of that kind of contributed to it. And again, I feel like really in many ways accidental, unanticipated moves. It wasn't anything super thought out.

Speaker 1: 20:34

I did want to go back to DC.

Speaker 1: 20:36

I had interned in DC, you know, summers in college and things and wanted to go back there and I knew there was a lot of public health work in DC.

Speaker 1: 20:44

And I actually reached out to my mentor from grad school and was like, hey, trying to, you know, find work in DC, let me know.

Speaker 1: 20:51

And he was like, oh, my colleague is hiring for her research team on the truth anti smoking campaign. So the truth anti smoking campaign is one of the few well funded public health communication campaigns because of the way the funding was structured. So when all of the state attorney generals in the US essentially sued the tobacco companies for basically defrauding the public and there was big master settlement agreement there's actually a similar one with opioid companies now that funding is rolling out now but similarly in the 90s for the tobacco companies they had this master settlement agreement and they basically set aside a portion of those funds, almost the way universities do an endowment, and they funded this sort of independent nonprofit entity that used to be called the Legacy Foundation and is now called Truth Initiative to do this mass media campaign and they had in house research and evaluation team. Anyway, it was literally, yeah, a random outreach to a mentor from grad school and he said, oh, she's hiring, I applied and then was there for several years actually.

Speaker 2: 22:02

And this was in like a research role right.

Speaker 1: 22:05

Research and evaluation role. So yeah, so I went from kind of program managing, a more on the ground kind of program, to very much research and evaluation.

Speaker 2: 22:16

What are your thoughts on taking like similar roles but there's different skill sets that you're learning early on in your career and trying a little bit of everything in the beginning to figure out like where is it that your interests and your strengths lie?

Speaker 1: 22:31

Right, right, and I think, yeah, this goes back to kind of those pearls on a necklace kind of idea, like I feel like state health department was doing a little bit of everything. You know, I was doing a little bit of research and evaluation because like there wasn't, you know, a separate research and evaluation team.

Speaker 1: 22:48

The person who programmed it, all the things so you know is doing on site trainings and talks at schools. I was doing some like survey development and evaluation and some reporting, some like creation of communication materials, like a little bit of all the things, and then at truth really got a very in depth orientation both to health communications and you know we were not involved directly in developing the messaging and things like that, but we kind of saw the reality of how that all worked and at truth again, because it is one of the few unusually well funded public health campaigns.

Speaker 1: 23:30

You know they worked with professional marketing agencies. You know, did like a full gamut of market research, the way that companies do, and all of that, and sort of saw how the creative side of it came together. And then, of course, was directly involved in like the research evaluation side of it and saw what you know a large scale evaluation of a national campaign looked like all of the nuances and details of that. So, yeah, learned a lot and ultimately, again like my move from truth was really motivated by I was feeling very siloed, like I'm getting deeper and deeper into this tobacco prevention and control work and like I was sort of like where's my big public health upstream determinants? Everything is interconnected stuff, and so I actually went specifically looking for like where could I work in DC that actually does that?

Speaker 1: 24:22

And that's sort of how I found Trust for America's Health, which I had like read about and heard about in grad school and stuff. But and it's a very small in terms of number of employees, small nonprofit, but they very much work across topics, like they're not working on a particular public health issue, they're working on public health for at large and trying to make the case for policy change in a way that cuts across issues and I mean not to say they don't have some like specific topics they work on. But especially when I started there, the very first report for them that I worked on was their blueprint that they do every four years. That's kind of big picture of public health policy recommendations for the new administration, and so that's sort of what. What took me to Trust for America's Health was an interest in getting at that like cross cutting type approach and also a more policy lens as well.

Speaker 2: 25:17

Yeah, and as you're kind of talking through each of the roles that you've held, I keep thinking back to the pearls on the necklace and like I visually have your LinkedIn profile open. So I'm like following along and I can picture that right, like you went from knowing how to like work on a program at the state level and then you're like going into work on some data as a researcher and then going into communication, and I'm assuming that interest grew more when you were at Truth Initiative because you're exposed to stakeholders kind of in that field and the marketing companies. So I think for our listeners sometimes, when they listen to stories or the journeys of more established public health practitioners, it feels like this, like perfect line that they were able to follow, and we know that it's not like that right, they think about my own journey. It looks perfect on paper but I think sometimes you question your decisions, sometimes you get opportunities that you have to pass over because it's just not aligned, but then when you look at it on LinkedIn, it looks perfect.

Speaker 1: 26:29

Well, that's the thing. It's like the retrospect, I mean. This is where, like sometimes, I worry that my inclination towards storytelling does a disservice to what you're talking about, which is the reality that, like nothing, feels like a story that makes sense when you're in it right.

Speaker 1: 26:43

Like none of my moves were all that intentional or planned and like none of it made sense at the time, like it was just sort of an Opportunity presented itself. It sort of checked enough boxes that I wanted to do it and I did it, and sort of ten years down the road, looking at it in the rear view mirror, you can tell a story that makes it all connect and feels like pearls on a necklace or whatever, but like in the moment, none of it felt that way and I think it often doesn't and that's okay, like I think that, whether we See it or not, you know, we are all the sum of the experiences we've had and that will Eventually, you know, find a way to shine through.

Speaker 2: 27:30

Yeah, I Sometimes get to run this workshop. I call it career road mapping and it's about like figuring out what you want to do next in your career. But I often start that workshop and I dedicate a lot of time for people to sit and just quietly reflect on the path that they came from and like write down everything that they've done. And Every single time I've done that, when I ask people to share kind of just the emotions that came up, everyone is often very proud of everything they've done, which they didn't realized when they came to that workshop. And and I tell people that you can do this stuff regularly every year. So to just think back to where you've come and put that story together, if you will right like sometimes it's, you don't need to be on a podcast to tell you a story. You can sit at your desk and and reflect and be really proud of the decisions you've had to make in the pivots and I think sometimes it empowers us to Put a little bit of a story to all the different things that we've done.

Speaker 1: 28:36

Right now. It's a really good. It's a really good point that that in and of itself can provide some confidence. You know, pride, as you were saying exactly.

Speaker 2: 28:48

Yeah, yeah yeah. I had a Period where I thought maybe I wanted to go into like migration, health or something.

Speaker 1: 28:55

Okay, yeah, and.

Speaker 2: 28:57

I was. I remember thinking I was like oh man, I built my entire career on like infectious disease epidemiology. There's no way, like I have any experience to like using an application, but kind of like reflecting back, you end up finding the little threads of where you did work on those topics and it actually was there throughout these past few years and you end up like telling that story if you don't look for the story.

Speaker 1: 29:23

That's right. That's right. I find that comes through for me a lot now as a consultant, when you know I'm submitting in response to, like a request for proposal, or even just you know Someone's reaching out and I'm at. You know, tell me a little bit about your experience in this space is exactly what you're saying. So yeah, oh yeah, like I forgot, there was like this little thread and this little Start putting them together and it kind of all adds up, even if you it wasn't really like top of mind.

Speaker 2: 29:53

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a good segue to Talking about the next pivot you made in your career and ended up, I guess, working for yourself and founded a company called pop health. So how did that happen and why did it happen?

Speaker 1: 30:09

Yeah, absolutely. So. Here is another. I will share what what it was like and what the motivating factors were in real time. And then kind of the story that Appears in retrospect but I think at the time it was Largely, if not entirely, practically motivated.

Speaker 1: 30:30

So I was working at trust for America's health. I made the transition from working on the truth campaign to trust for America's health while I was getting my DRPH part-time. So I had already started that while I was at truth and then, like transition to trust for America's health, was still working on my DRPH part-time and I Defended my dissertation proposal so not the actual dissertation, but the phase before that defended my proposal when I was like seven and a half, eight months pregnant and then Then went on maternity leave from work and then after a few months came back To working full-time in DC we live in Northern Virginia so I was commuting like an hour each way, five days a week, working full-time, coming back home to Wanting to spend time with the baby, and then was sort of like, hmm, I have this dissertation that I'm supposed to be working on and writing and I don't think this All adds up. The math isn't method, as they say, and so I was like, okay, what do I do? And it's very funny thinking about this now, sort of like again with COVID, and like the way things changed and whatever.

Speaker 1: 31:43

But at the time when I, you know, went to my employer and was like, hey, can I Work from home once or twice a week? Can I switch to part-time? And they're basically like no, hmm. So I was like, alright, peace out, like this isn't gonna work. And so On my way out I was like you know, I was working on a couple projects. At the time I was like, you know, if you want me to continue to support those projects in a consulting capacity, I'm happy to do that. You know, just be working on my dissertation, so I have some time. And they were like, yes, let's do that.

Speaker 1: 32:18

And so I started off during the period I was working on my dissertation at trust, for Marcus health was my only client and I was like very part-time, just, you know, working on some projects there Finished my dissertation, you know, had the time to like spend more time at home and with the baby and all of these things finish the dissertation graduated and then I was, like you know, I sort of started Consulting, like maybe I can see if I can just turn this into what I do. And so it started almost as a little experiment of like okay, let's Do some networking, talk to some people, see if I can get more clients, or what have you, and then it just sort of slowly, slowly grew from there.

Speaker 2: 33:07

Wow. And so, when you think back, what is this story here?

Speaker 1: 33:12

Yes, oh yes, thank you for reminding me the second part of it. The story which I feel like only became Super clear in retrospect, is that while I was working at trust for America's health so again I came specifically because I was like I want to work at this intersection of different public health topics, I want to think upstream, I want to think about policy systems change I actually loved all like that is what working at trust for America's health was all of those things and I loved it and At the same time I found myself feeling so Disconnected, like I was like we're doing this sort of 30,000 foot level policy research, we're putting out these reports, but like I don't Know what's happening on the ground, I don't know that communities are, you know, are they getting these reports? Are they looking at them? Is any of this like translating at that level? Like I know, at trust for America's health, they, you know, they had a government affairs team. They were, you know, working with taking these policy recommendations to Congress. They were absolutely, you know, moving forward at that level.

Speaker 1: 34:19

But for me personally, I was just like and again, kind of those state health department roots, like I used to be out in these communities, and I was just like I feel really disconnected. And so I knew that when I hit this point where I was like, okay, let me see if I can turn this consulting thing into something, I knew that for it to be satisfying to me, you know, I wanted to see if I could create something that would be a bridge between this 30,000 foot policy level and the communities where the work is actually taking place. And so eventually and it took a while I feel like when you're starting your own consulting practice and building it up, at the beginning it was definitely like I'll do almost anything that anyone is interested in hiring me to do.

Speaker 1: 35:10

But once sort of I hit like a certain level of having built things up when I started focusing down on like what I wanted in my consulting practice to focus on. I was very much thinking about like how can I do things that will help bridge, like I still want to do that policy, systems upstream work and I want to feel more connected to communities and to be able to bridge that piece. And so in consulting they talk a lot about like meaching down. So when I finally sort of niche down, popped health, that was my goal and I really am now focused on working with community coalitions and collaboratives that are trying to transform health in their communities through policy and systems change and really try to kind of be this bridge to.

Speaker 1: 36:02

You know, there's lots of great research and tools and strategies and information around. How do we collaborate with community, how do we collaborate across multi-center coalitions? How do we engage in action planning and strategic planning? How do we do evaluation in a way that's participatory and how do we tell our stories, evaluation and impact in all of these things? And so those are the things I now focus on working with community coalitions and collaboratives that are on the ground in their communities and really trying to bring this support and extend their capacity and build their capacity to do these kinds of things.

Speaker 2: 36:41

And so like, what exactly are like services that they're getting from PopHealth? Are you developing communication products for them or are you facilitating workshops or things like that?

Speaker 1: 36:53

Yeah, so you're actually capturing the transition that PopHealth is currently in. So I feel like right now we do a little bit of both of those things. But, yeah, our main areas of services are in the areas of community collaborations and that looks very different in every community and depending on the topic and the group and whatever. But basically, how do we make this work community driven? How do we work with community members? How do we make sure their input is not just captured but also driving whatever is happening? And also that collaboration across multi-sector coalitions like there's a lot just in how do we work together as a coalition or a collaborative across organizations and sectors. And then we do a lot of meeting, facilitation, that sort of thing with coalitions to help them work together more effectively. And also around action planning. So actually moving them through kind of like visioning and coming up with aims to what does that mean for specific action steps you're gonna take and who's gonna take them and what's that gonna look like. And really getting granular with that.

Speaker 1: 38:01

We do evaluation and monitoring, evaluation and learning services and helping coalitions and collaboratives track their impacts, gather data, tell the stories and then effective storytelling. So really thinking about how, what stories are we sharing? How are we sharing them? How can we make our communication compelling, digestible, understandable to community members? So right now, with a lot of the coalitions we work with, we are really like in their facilitating meetings. We are writing action plans, we are gathering data for evaluation and synthesizing it, creating communication products, all of those things.

Speaker 1: 38:42

And I think, as Pop Health has grown and as we collectively and I personally, kind of start to hit capacity in terms of like there are no more hours in the week we are currently in a phase, I would say, of sort of transitioning a little bit more to how can we build the capacity of coalitions to do this work, so thinking a little bit more about trainings and workshops and other ways to get information out there. We have a biweekly newsletter that we're really have been gearing up recently to really put these strategies and tools in the hands of coalitions and hoping to move more in that direction and that feels a little bit more scalable, where we can still be this bridge between the big picture policy systems, change in communities but maybe do that in a way where we can scale a little bit and work with more coalitions without running out of our own time.

Speaker 2: 39:39

So when you have your own company and I know you like talking about solo partnership and entrepreneurship a lot as well you're just learning how to not only like deliver services to your clients, but also trying to figure out, like, how do I take this business that I've created and make it functional and sustainable? And you're kind of having to like pivot within that itself as well, right yeah 100%.

Speaker 2: 40:05

This has been such a lovely chat, venu and I know when we recorded the other episode with Leah and talked about self-employment in public health, we did say that that conversation didn't end Just yet. We have a lot more to talk about and so for anyone listening who's like wondering why I didn't get to dive deeper into pop health and kind of like that journey, we're hoping we can do that in a different episode and this was exclusively just to learn about the journey that Venu has taken and all the pearls that she's collected on that necklace. So thank you so much for joining me on this episode.

Speaker 1: 40:44

I'm pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Hey, I hope you enjoyed that episode.

Speaker 2: 40:49

And if you want to get the links or information mentioned in today's episode, you can head over to phspotorg slash podcast and we'll have everything there for you. And before you go, I want to tell you about the Public Health Career Club. So if you've been looking for a place to connect and build meaningful relationships with other public health professionals from all around the world, you should join us in the public health community. From all around the world. You should join us in the Public Health Career Club.

Speaker 2: 41:19

We launched the club with the vision of becoming the number one hangout spot dedicated to building and growing your dream public health career. And in addition to being able to connect and build those meaningful relationships with other public health professionals, the club also offers other great resources for your career growth and success, like mindset coaching, job preparation clinics and career growth strategy sessions in the form of trainings and talks, all delivered by experts and inspiring individuals in these areas. So if you want to learn more or want to join the club, you can visit our page at phspotorg slash club and we'll have all the information there. And as a space that's being intentionally curated to bring together like-minded public health professionals who are not only there to push themselves to become the best versions of themselves, but also each other, and with that I can't wait to see how this is going to have a ripple effect in the world, as we all work together to better the health of our populations and just have immense impact in the world, and I hope you'll be joining us in the Public Health Career Club.