Awards
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We are excited to announce a new Travel Award opportunity for student members attending the ABCT annual meeting! Thank you to the SGM SIG for inspiring the guidelines for this award!
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Each year, two student members who are new to ABCT and who are from a traditionally underrepresented background will receive this award to support their attendance at the convention. The goal of this award is to increase the richness and diversity of our SIG membership by providing financial support to diverse scholars who may not otherwise be able to attend. In line with this intention, applicants must: (1) be a student (undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, or graduate) or in another post-baccalaureate position (e.g., a research assistant); (2) be new to ABCT (i.e., attended no more than one annual meeting before application); (3) provide a brief, one-paragraph plan for how attendance at the convention will allow them to develop as a scholar (e.g., specific sessions they will attend, scholars they intend to meet); and (4) agree to submit a 500-word post-convention post for the SIG website (e.g., summary of sessions attended, Q&A with a O/R scholar met at the convention, etc). Unlike our other awards, recipients of this award do not need to have an accepted presentation at the annual convention. Recipients of this award will receive an honorarium of $300.
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Please see below for the related blog post for both of our 2023 award winners!
Travel Award
Tessa Palafu: 2023 Travel Award Winner
This past November, I attended my first ABCT conference in Seattle. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity that was made possible with the support from my workplace, The Baker Center for Children and Families, and the Oppression & Resilience SIG. Those three conference days were packed with symposia’s, panels, and talks that reignited my excitement for the work. Overall, there are three key takeaways that I carried back home with me.
One: Refocus my passions. I find it easy to get lost in the myriad of research areas, questions, projects, etc. As a post-baccalaureate research assistant, I assumed this was a good quality to have to broaden my experience and skill set. On day 2 of the conference, I attended the symposium “Cultural Adaptation and Implementation of Evidence-Based Interventions,” where I got to learn about the importance of culture from development to implementation. I particularly enjoyed the presentation on the development of the Family Spirit Strengths program for Indigenous American populations. The presenter’s discussion about the importance of the program and it’s impact was encouraging. I left with a reminder of the work I am truly passionate about that center around creating and delivering impactful services to Native Hawaiian, Samoan, and other Pacific Islander communities.
Two: Look to the strengths. Again, on day 2 of the conference I attended the panel “Transactional to Transformational: Advancing Equity Through Meaningful Community-Engaged Research with Underserved Populations.” This discussion was one of the highlights of the entire conference and the panelists were all people that I look up to. One of the panelists, Dr. Kalei Kanuha, iterated throughout the panel the importance of looking at the strengths in a community, instead of focusing on the disparity. This has been modeled to me throughout my professional career so far, but hearing it laid out plainly was a needed reminder.
Three: Value relationships. I could ramble on about the formal discussions and panels, which was informative and will shape the work I do moving forward. But, I found the most value in getting to connect with other attendees. This conference gave me the opportunity to meet people I had only ever interacted with on Zoom or through email. More importantly, once I got home, I still had those connections to continue discussing our lessons learned and brainstorm ways to incorporate these lessons into our current work. Without these relationships, all my excitement and ideas could easily fizzle away. But luckily, I have a supportive network that fuels my passion and helps bring my ideas to fruition. In addition to these three key takeaways, I also had a few professional accomplishments. I presented in the symposium “Strategies to Incorporate Community Partners Perspectives from Design to Implementation,” and at the SIG poster expo with my poster “Clinicians Utilization and Perception of Measurement-Based Care: A Look at Hawai’i’s Department of Health Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division.” Now looking forward to 2024, I hope to attend ABCT in Philadelphia!