Over the past nine summers, the Penn Center for Public Health has trained Philadelphia high schoolers to tackle health problems affecting their own communities.<\/p>\n
The six-week-long summer program teaches high school students across the city to design, conduct, and present an original public health project. Next year, Public Health Pipeline Plus will celebrate its 10th anniversary.<\/p>\n
The program maintains a \u201clarge focus on exposing students to the field of public health as a potential career path\u201d through field trips and interactive workshops with \u201cdiverse\u201d speakers, Penn Center for Public Health Program Manager Frankie Cameron said in an interview.<\/p>\n
It aims to invite community health leaders who \u201creflect\u201d students\u2019 \u201clived experiences,\u201d according to Cameron.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe try to bring in a lot of young people who are from Philadelphia, of different races and cultural backgrounds, who have made change in the city,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n For example, she said one speaker from the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led environmental advocacy organization, discussed \u201cadvocacy around environmental health issues in Philly, including the movement to reduce heat in schools by getting A\/C units in schools.\u201d<\/p>\n The program, launched in 2017, was born out of a 2017 Master of Public Health graduate Tolulope Oyetunde\u2019s capstone project.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to Cameron, Oyetunde was passionate about training and encouraging young Philadelphians to go into the field of public health and establishing a workforce of public health professionals who are from the \u201ccommunities most impacted by health inequities.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2020, three years after receiving her degree, Oyetunde was diagnosed<\/a> with breast cancer. In 2024, she died. For Cameron, \u201ccontinuing this program and building on it in her legacy\u201d is vital.\u00a0<\/p>\n Cameron joined the program\u2019s organizing team in 2023 alongside Zachary Steele, who now serves as the director of Moelis Access Science at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships.<\/p>\n Steele described in an interview how he and Cameron \u201crevamped\u201d the program\u2019s curriculum to center on youth participatory action research. Steele added that this framework, which encourages project-based learning among young students, is powerful because it \u201ccenters kids\u2019 lived experiences\u201d and sets students up to conduct \u201coriginal research.\u201d<\/p>\n The program also hires five to seven graduate and undergraduate student workers who act as facilitators.<\/p>\n Semanti Pathak, a 2026 Master of Public Health graduate and former graduate assistant at the Center for Public Health, said in an interview that students are the primary researchers in the work they produce.<\/p>\n Pathak, who coordinated the summer program this summer, explained that the first two weeks provide foundational knowledge for public health work, including how health disparities prevail in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n Over the subsequent four weeks, students develop an original research question, craft and optimize survey tools, and conduct fieldwork using interviews and focus groups. At the end of the program, they deliver a presentation to program administrators, alumni, professors, and researchers.<\/p>\n It\u2019s \u201cempowering\u201d for the students to have an audience \u201clistening to them report on something that they themselves are the experts on,\u201d Pathak said.<\/p>\n Public Health Pipeline Plus is one of many summer youth programs partially funded by the City of Philadelphia, which allows students to fill out a citywide application and receive stipends from the local government to participate. Most program participants come from the Netter Center\u2019s University-Assisted Community Schools in West Philadelphia.<\/p>\n Cameron said that one of the beautiful \u201cstrengths\u201d of the program is the \u201ccommunity bonds built within.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere are students who, just since I\u2019ve been there, have come back to the program four summers in a row,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In the past, former students of the program have returned as facilitators after completing their undergraduate degrees.<\/p>\n Steele reiterated that Public Health Pipeline Plus is \u201ca specific piece\u201d within the Netter Center\u2019s Educational Pipeline program.<\/p>\n \u201cThe program sits within this larger frame of kids developing an understanding of the wider aspects of healthcare and health sciences, and careers and pathways\u201d in these fields, he added. For student facilitators, Steele added that working with local high school students provides an opportunity to \u201creflect\u201d on one\u2019s own schooling and \u201cconsider questions of education equity.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a really difficult time in history to be a young person,\u201d Cameron acknowledged, adding that it is \u201cstriking\u201d for students to find \u201cadults who believe in them and their ability to make change.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s about showing how that expertise can be used to create change in their communities,\u201d she concluded. \u201cShowing them that, individually, it can be difficult to fight systems, but together we can.\u201d<\/p>\n Staff reporter Can Doga Bolukbasi covers science and health and can be reached at bolukbasi@thedp.com<\/a>. At Penn, he studies biochemistry. Follow him on X @cdbolukbasi<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past nine summers, the Penn Center for Public Health has trained Philadelphia high schoolers to tackle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":306245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-306244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}