Connecting health, happiness, and community — from Harvard School of Public Health to East Boston
“The center primarily is focused on really connecting health with happiness. . . I think communities are . . . the centers where this work takes place.”
This is part 1 of 2 from an interview between Carolina Espinoza and Dr. K. “Vish” Viswanath, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communication in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH); Director, Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness, and East Boston community joy advisory board member.
Centering equity in policy, practice, and communications for health and happiness
My name is Vish Vishwanath. I am Lee Kum Kee Professor of Health Communications at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Most of my work at the school and Dana-Farber focuses on understanding how knowledge from controlled research settings can be translated to influence policy and practice. As I do that work, I have two principles that guide my work.
One is that I center equity so that I feel that all groups, irrespective of their backgrounds, class, race, sexual orientation, geography, place, irrespective of their backgrounds, they should benefit from knowledge that’s produced in research and two, to make sure that stakeholders and community groups are engaged in the translational process. So I use, you know, a lot of community-based participatory research principles as I do this work and I have a couple of platforms that I use in doing this kind of work or that I build on.
One is I am the director for the Center for Health and Happiness. It’s called the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard Chan School of Public Health. I also head Harvard Chan’s India Research Center and a lab which is called the Center for Translational Communications. All three centers allow me to, you know, do the kind of work I want to do.
What is your vision for the work of the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness? How would you define success there?
So the center primarily is focused on really connecting health with happiness. So there are a number of centers in the country and even in the world which focus either purely on health or on happiness. And what we are trying to do in our center is to really bring those two areas together.
By happiness, for example, we focus a lot on well-being, which goes back to the classic World Health Organization’s definition that health is not merely an absence of disease or infirmity, but a complete state of well-being, physical, psychological, and social. The social part we often forget.
And so what we are trying to do is really bring those three dimensions together in studying, you know, this connection between health and happiness. So our goal at the center is to pursue research or produce knowledge connecting these three dimensions together.
Number two, really ensuring that this knowledge is translated, as I said earlier, to influence policy and practice. So what that means is to make sure that we work with community organizations. My presence here is one illustration of that.
You know, I think communities are actually the centers where this work takes place. So our job as I said is to really help facilitate, work with communities to promote well-being in addition to producing that knowledge, but also to make sure that we take what is being done in the community back to the lab or the research settings, so to speak, to inform our own work.
And so our goal is, I hope, that we will be able to accomplish this pursuit of knowledge connecting health and well-being, and number two, translate that knowledge, and number three, take our collaborations and activities in the community back to the lab to study the questions, you know, and to study problems.
And I hope throughout this process again just to remind all of us that we keep equity central to our work.
In part 2, Dr. Viswanath will share his communications expertise as we work to communicate to create positive change — and he tells us what brings him joy. Stay tuned! Thank you again to Dr. Viswanath for this interview — and all your support — and to Carolina for interviewing him and for all your work for this blog!
This is the 34th post about boosting joy the only way we can: in community. Please share, subscribe, and join our movement by emailing me or supporting East Boston Social Centers. Stay joyful, East Boston.
