Let the Academies Bloom
by Danielle Hairston, MD, Residency Training Director, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Howard University, and Nathaniel Hundt. Graphics and media by Ellen Duda and Jeffrey Levick.
This past fall, Howard University School of Medicine launched the CADRE Academy for people with lived experience of having received mental health diagnoses. The Academy’s intention is to serve as a beacon of knowledge around healthcare policy development and help people with lived experience play important roles in the policy process.
We had the wonderful opportunity to collaborate with Keris Myrick on this launch and are grateful to Rebecca Cokley and the Ford Foundation for sponsoring this work. On the Dr. Katz app, Howard has now organized powerful lived experience stories and video lessons featuring presenters from Mental Health America, Yale’s Program on Community Recovery, Harvard Medical School, the Commonwealth Fund, Georgia state government, SAMHSA, National Disability Institute, and more organizations.
We’re proud to share that these online learning experiences are now available to all — simply create an account and enroll.
The first CADRE cohort of learners hailed from 12 different states and completed online trainings prior to getting together in-person. The training week included workshops, social gatherings, and participatory experiences that culminated with a visit to Capitol Hill. Throughout the week, we were struck by the impact of the flipped classroom approach. Heshima Hardy, a social worker at University of California — San Francisco (UCSF), remarked:
I really liked the mobile app. It helped me complete the educational portions of the CADRE training. It had lots of videos [that] make learning accessible to multiple people…Some people may be auditory learners and some may be visual. The app was able to …keep the experience engaging.
By the time people arrived in Washington, D.C., they had a shared understanding of why they were there, a basic of understanding of the legislative process, as well as the impacts of historical mental health policy initiatives — we all felt ready to build community.
As we look ahead, the Dr. Katz vision involves removing barriers for academic medical centers, like Howard, to create and share high-quality training and education in a common place that feels collegial. We firmly believe that modern knowledge platforms should be multi-purpose. This means they should continuously provide tailored knowledge for professional development, and also provide clinicians with resources they can trust and bring into professional practice — we have heard this described as a modern “Coursera meets UpToDate.”
Often though, we hear that “course creation feels daunting.” We know that video content production budgeting can get in the way between a great idea or concept and successful delivery. That’s why if you need a boost or a jumpstart, the Dr. Katz team also brings decades of instructional design experience to the table.
There were tons of great ideas for how to improve the platform that came out of the CADRE Academy launch, too. Some of the top asks include allowing learners to purchase training that awards continuing education (CE/CME) credits, as well as adding an ability to interact with engaging simulation exercises — imagine being able to practice sharing your lived experience story in a conversational manner and getting real-time feedback from a legislative staffer “virtual agent.” It may seem futuristic, but this is the direction we see learning technologies moving.
We are excited to play a role in supporting the academy ecosystem and will share more learnings in 2025!
