Teaching and curriculum
Public-health instruction grounded in evidence, community wisdom, cultural context, and practical application.
Courses taught
Undergraduate courses connecting health education, community practice, research, theory, leadership, and policy.
The basic philosophy, principles, and content of health education are discussed as background for suggested solutions to health problems. Students learn the seven major roles and responsibilities of a health educator and gain an understanding of health education practice in a variety of work settings.
This course focuses on concepts of community health, factors influencing community health, and community resources for preventing and eliminating community health problems. Special emphasis is placed on citizens’ responsibilities and participation at the local, state, national, and international levels.
This course focuses on the health professional’s role in working with community groups. Emphasis is placed on developing skills in interpersonal communication, diagnosing group difficulties, and intervening to increase the effectiveness of working groups.
This course studies theories used to assess the need for community health education programs and to plan, implement, and evaluate those programs. Special attention is given to theories at the organizational and community levels.
A study of the philosophy, principles, and practices of public health. Topics include the history of public health; the organization of public health at local, state, and federal levels; the determinants of health and illness, with special attention to racial and ethnic health disparities; and efforts to reform the United States health care system.
An overview of the process for assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating health promotion and prevention programs for targeted populations.
This course focuses on approaches for communicating health information through multiple channels. Students design, produce, and use educational media and materials to inform and influence individual and community decisions that enhance health.
This course introduces basic research methods and methods for evaluating health promotion programs. Students compare qualitative and quantitative approaches, examine field research and data collection strategies, and prepare oral and poster presentations.
This course examines a major United States health issue through public-health and public-policy perspectives. Students use policy assessment, analysis, and advocacy and may analyze a policy, plan an advocacy campaign, or implement or evaluate a recently adopted health policy.
Course designed
Examines how theological ideas about human dignity, justice, suffering, healing, and collective responsibility shape public-health ethics, systems, and practice.
Why it is needed
Public-health education often discusses culture and ethics without treating theology as a serious source of health beliefs, institutional power, community trust, or moral reasoning. Theological education may address care and justice without giving learners the population-health tools needed to translate those commitments into practice. This course brings those conversations into the same room.
Sample assignment
Learners select a current public-health issue, such as maternal mortality, vaccine confidence, food insecurity, or environmental injustice, and analyze it through one theological concept and one public-health framework. The final product is a concise policy or ministry action brief that identifies affected communities, ethical tensions, evidence, and a practical response.
What it is: A practical, evidence-informed product connecting scholarship, lived experience, ethical reflection, and accountable action.
Course designed
Connects faith, colonial history, global inequity, migration, humanitarian action, and community authority across diverse cultural and religious contexts.
Why it is needed
Global-health training can treat religion as background culture instead of a living force that shapes institutions, aid, identity, resistance, and care. Theology courses may discuss missions and service without fully examining colonial legacies, unequal power, or community authority. This course asks who defines help, who holds knowledge, and who remains accountable after an intervention ends.
Sample assignment
Learners examine a real or proposed global-health partnership and map its history, decision-making power, funding, community voice, and intended outcomes. They then redesign one part of the partnership to strengthen local authority, cultural humility, ethical storytelling, and accountable return.
What it is: A practical, evidence-informed product connecting scholarship, lived experience, ethical reflection, and accountable action.
Course designed
Studies the Black Church as a historic site of care, resistance, health communication, organizing, and public-health partnership, while also examining trust, power, gender, and accountability.
Why it is needed
Health systems frequently approach Black churches as convenient recruitment sites rather than institutions with history, expertise, internal diversity, and legitimate authority. At the same time, celebratory accounts can overlook gendered labor, stigma, institutional harm, and uneven trust. This course holds the Black Church’s public-health legacy and its necessary accountability together.
Sample assignment
Learners conduct a community-informed assessment of one health priority and design a covenant between a congregation and a public-health partner. The deliverable defines shared goals, decision rights, compensation, communication practices, safeguards, measures of progress, and how findings or benefits will return to the community.
What it is: A practical, evidence-informed product connecting scholarship, lived experience, ethical reflection, and accountable action.
Course designed
Explores the Black Church’s diasporic and global relationships, including missions, migration, development, health justice, and culturally grounded community engagement.
Why it is needed
Courses on the Black Church are often bounded by the United States, while global-health curricula may flatten the Black diaspora into a single experience. This leaves limited space to examine how migration, missions, African and Caribbean partnerships, remittances, racialization, and diasporic faith networks influence health and power across borders.
Sample assignment
Learners trace a health concern across two Black diasporic contexts and develop a culturally grounded partnership proposal. The project must identify historical ties, local knowledge, spiritual or institutional assets, power differences, and measures that communities themselves would recognize as meaningful.
What it is: A practical, evidence-informed product connecting scholarship, lived experience, ethical reflection, and accountable action.
Course designed
Examines how meaning, belonging, spiritual practice, religious institutions, hope, harm, and sacred identity may shape health behaviors, care experiences, and health outcomes.
Why it is needed
Social determinants frameworks explain many material conditions that shape health, but they may leave meaning, belonging, sacred identity, spiritual harm, and religious institutional influence poorly measured or unnamed. This course studies those factors without romanticizing religion or treating spirituality as a substitute for clinical care, policy change, or material resources.
Sample assignment
Learners build a community-centered assessment for a selected population or setting. The tool considers protective and harmful spiritual influences, belonging, meaning, institutional trust, access to care, and material conditions. Learners also write an implementation note explaining consent, referral boundaries, cultural humility, and how results should be interpreted.
What it is: A practical, evidence-informed product connecting scholarship, lived experience, ethical reflection, and accountable action.
How the courses are offered
Offerings are available virtually, in person, or in a hybrid format. Institutions may purchase the full five-course package, build a certificate partnership, or select one or more courses à la carte.
60–90 minutes, virtual or in person
Interactive teaching with an applied exercise
Expanded instruction, discussion, and facilitated application
Customized syllabus, instruction, assignments, and institutional adaptation
Designed with the institution for undergraduate, graduate, or professional learners
Pricing is developed by proposal based on audience, scope, delivery format, course customization, assessment, licensing, travel, and institutional requirements. Final scope and pricing are confirmed in writing.
Course inquiries
Share your audience, preferred format, anticipated date, location, and learning goals.
info@RhodesEffect.com