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Celebrating 25 Years of ICH
SUMMER 2026 NEWSLETTER
| | A message from ICH Executive Director, Sarah Jalbert |
 | | Twenty five years of ICH is something big to celebrate! We welcomed current and former staff, board members, community partners, and clients to reflect on what ICH has meant to all of us over the years, and where we will be heading in the future. Dr. David Bor, ICH co-founder and perennial champion of our work, was presented with ICH’s first ever “Founders Award,” highlighting his vision and commitment to centering community members in research and evaluation. ICH’s Community Action Hub described our commitment to training and employing researchers with lived experience of homelessness. Dr. Kiame Mahania, former ICH board member and current Secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services, described the clear need for the work ICH does across the state, especially as funding for equitable health improvement approaches dwindles. The through line was clear, taking us from ICH’s origins during the HIV/AIDS epidemic to today’s most urgent issues: the work ICH does matters, and we are proud to do it.
| | Evaluation of Recovery-Based Reentry Services | | Evaluation of Voices for Health Justice 2.0 | | Language Services Evaluation and Quality Improvement at Cambridge Health Alliance | | | | |
Since 2011, ICH has worked with Cambridge Health Alliance’s Multicultural Affairs and Patient Services Department to provide technical assistance and support a range of language services evaluation and quality improvement initiatives.
Read more about this partnership
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America250
By Jessica Santos
| Jessica Santos reflected on how the history of the founding of the United States is resonating at this moment of time, and connects those tensions to our work at the Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research to advance health and well-being for all. | |
Developing and retaining qualified Behavioral Health professionals in Massachusetts
By Emily Hahn, Ariela Braverman Bronstein, and Jordan Kron
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The findings from the Behavioral Health Workforce Initiative evaluation demonstrate how providing support with compensation and professional development can contribute to Behavioral Health workforce retention, particularly in historically underserved areas.
Read more
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Updates from the Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research
The Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research (LZC), a center at ICH, is working closely with immigrant-led and immigrant-serving organizations in Massachusetts and beyond to advance immigrant health and well-being. See LZC’s summer newsletter here, where we reflect on how we resist dehumanization, preserve democracy, and put john a. powell’s concepts of bridging and belonging into practice in our research. It also includes an overview of our recent research, including Immigrant Mental Health Services in Greater Boston: A Landscape Review and ICED IN: The Actions and Impacts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Massachusetts in 2025. You can find the full ICED IN report, the executive summary (which has been translated into Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese), poster, video presentation, and a social media toolkit on our website.
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Alex Kornblum
Epidemiologist I and Research Associate
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Ranjani Paradise, PhD
Director of Evaluation
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Support ICH and LZC
Your donation brings us closer to our vision of a world in which empowered and knowledgeable communities achieve health equity and a high quality of life for all. We use donations to fund our work, and particularly for pilot and innovative projects that don't yet have a funding mechanism. Thank you very much for supporting our work.
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A message from ICH Board Chair, Ellen Lawton |
| | | The past several months have been a terrific reminder to me that community is literally our middle name. Our joyful gathering to celebrate 25 years in June was a beautiful convergence of community, spanning long-serving staff, leaders and partners to new people and organizations that we are just getting to know. Community morphs and changes, and so too does ICH's board. We bid goodbye to valued board member Aviva Must (Morton A. Madoff Professor Dept. of Public Health & Community Medicine Tufts University School of Medicine) who served with distinction since 2017, and we welcomed Rose Molina (Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School; Vice Chair for Community Engagement, Advocacy, and Equity in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center; practicing obstetrician-gynecologist at The Dimock Center) and Jennifer Cedor (Supervising Attorney, Immigrant Health Initiative, Health Law Advocates). New faces, energy and expertise gathered around the same ICH values: a world in which empowered and knowledgeable communities achieve health equity and a high quality of life for all. Thank you for being in community with us!
| | The Institute for Community Health is a nonprofit consulting organization that provides participatory evaluation, applied research, assessment, planning, training, and technical assistance. ICH helps community-based organizations, government agencies, foundations, and healthcare institutions improve their services and maximize program impact. | | | | | | |
