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Jasmine Harrison
Project Narrative

For my internship at Georgia’s Department of Public Health Injury Prevention Program, I

worked on multiple different projects, but I only focused on three main ones within this

narrative. I worked on two projects related to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and one related

to violence prevention. These projects were needed to help BOLD different organizations create

partnerships together and facilitate health brain initiatives amongst them.

For my first project, I worked on a literature search for differences between age-friendly

and dementia-friendly. This was needed to help distinguish between the two as well as determine

steps to receive a dementia-friendly designation. During this search, I also looked for any

existing flyers to send to health departments on ways they can be more dementia friendly. My

search resulted in defining what specific characteristics are needed to be dementia- and/or age-

friendly, as well as the existence of checklists for both individuals and organizations that provide

resources for organizations to become dementia-friendly. I was able to create a resource packet

that highlights these differences in addition to flyers for dementia-friendly businesses and flyers

on domains needed to receive a dementia- and/or age-friendly designation.

The second mini project that I worked on was to create a virtual meeting between BOLD,

dementia care specialists, the eighteen health districts, and the area agencies on aging. My role

was to create an agenda for the meeting and determine the best strategy for facilitating

conversation between the partners. What I ended up creating was an agenda that was split into

two sections: an overview section for BOLD, dementia care specialists, community health

worker initiatives, and a chronic disease prevention district work overview. The second half of

the meeting would be dedicated to breakout sessions where each health district could meet and

collaborate with their area agency on aging. In this section of the meeting, partners would
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Jasmine Harrison
discuss priorities, materials, potential partnerships, audiences, and topics in alignment. They

would also brainstorm collaboration possibilities on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, avoidable

hospitalizations, and the intersection of chronic disease management. For this section of the

meeting, I created a map that displayed the different health districts and which counties fall

under each area agency on aging. This has been helpful to the team because before, we would

have to have two separate maps open, but now we can just use one. I also created a collaboration

worksheet that included all of the topics’ partners should discuss in their groups, including when

to commit to meeting as a group, sharing events, and any supporting activities.

The project that I worked on related to violence prevention is the Cardiff Project. This

project is based on the Cardiff model, which was created by a professor at Cardiff University in

the United Kingdom. In the United States, more than half of violent crimes are not reported to

law enforcement, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Cardiff project combines and

maps both hospital and police department data on violence to provide communities with

information to help them better understand where violence is occurring.

My role revolved around the data. After receiving the data from our partners, I was

responsible for uploading it to the master and working files for the data to be cleaned. Once in

the correct file, I would go in and rename the variables according to the workbook, as well as add

in any new variables necessary for geocoding. Some of the data required me to transpose the data

in order to report each victim as a separate incident. After cleaning the data, I would then upload

it to its respective repository. Once I determined which data points were mappable and geocoded,

I could then begin to map the data using heatmaps in QGIS. I mapped the data by month and by

partner/location and depicted the mappable locations by their offense type (i.e., aggravated

assault, robbery, etc.). I repeated this process monthly, whenever we received new data from our
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Jasmine Harrison
partners, and kept a record of how much data we received from each as well as the basic

demographics of the data for each month. At the beginning of my internship, we were only

receiving data from two partners, but we were able to bridge a partnership with a hospital in

Albany. Due to the new partnership, the data we received had different variables compared to the

other data sources, so we needed to create a new variable recoding workbook. I decided to create

that for future use as well as code for cleaning the new data using RStudio. In addition to those

workbooks, I also created several maps for this project that are used at the USIPP update

meetings.