Prioritizing Diversity

Ronnie Wimberley

The Juntos team has been working diligently to ensure the project is of the highest quality and greatest value to the Latin@ community.

Published April 7, 2014, last updated on October 5, 2017 under Voices of DGHI

By Ronnie Wimberley
2013-14 Bass Connections in Global Health project: Juntos - A Digital Intervention

The moment I signed up for the Juntos research team I started asking questions. Are people here just to fill out their resumes? Will our team deliver real and useful tangibles? Are our team members trained to enter minority communities carefully and critically? Are our team members trained to enter this minority community? Do they understand queer issues? Do they understand race issues? How about intersectionality? I began sounding off on day one.

Rather than confusion or misunderstanding, the team responded with an eagerness for critical engagement and a passion for answers that rivaled my own. We immediately began discussing the social and cultural implications of a team of Duke students entering an underserved minority community. At one moment we took care to address the language barriers and accessibility of our intervention. At another we critiqued the use of the term men who have sex with men (MSM) for its inability to encompass cultural nuance and its implicit association with HIV. Our team works diligently to ensure we maximize our supportive capacities and minimize our own footprints during this intervention.

By prioritizing communication within our team, we have been able to increase team cohesion to make our time together as effective as possible. Maintaining constant external communication with El Centro Hispano holds us accountable to our stated goals and the implications of our methods. Our commitment not only to a fair intervention, but also to a critical methodology, means our team has promise. I look forward to the output of our teamwork because more than working hard, we have committed ourselves to working carefully; and instead of working for El Centro Hispano, we maintain a commitment to working with the community at hand.