For more than a decade, the ETSU-Eastman Valleybrook Campus has been home to pioneering public health programs that were featured in a national journal, Wildnerness & Environmental Medicine.
The ETSU-Eastman Valleybrook campus, located on Pickens Road in Kingsport, houses the ETSU College of Public Health’s nationally award-winning Project EARTH curriculum and the Niswonger VILLAGE, the only public health simulation lab of its kind in the country that replicates how people live and work in low-resource settings.
“When you think of higher education, you think of classrooms and office spaces,” said Harrison Ihrig, a graduate student in the ETSU College of Public Health. “So when you walk into our workshop and you see tools and wood and all these different projects everywhere, it breaks the mold of what to expect.”
Niswonger Village gives students the tools to save lives in remote, low-resource areas around the world and to respond and assist when natural or human-caused disasters strike. In 2017, the VILLAGE and Project EARTH earned the Delta Omega Award for the most innovative public health curriculum in the country.
The Eastman-Valleybrook campus also includes AdaptoPlay and RE:CYCLING.
AdaptoPlay, a non-profit organization supported by Project EARTH that is dedicated to improving the quality of life of children (from birth to 17) with differing abilities by providing low tech solutions to reduce limitations and improve their ability to participate in play and mobility activities so they are better equipped to interact and participate more with their peers.
The RE:CYCLING program highlights efforts to solve public health issues using locally available technology. The program consists of two parts - refurbishing bicycles for local children and using bicycles to design “machines” that can improve the quality of life in low resource areas.
“ETSU College of Public Health has really let me go beyond just the classroom setting and be able to use these real-world skills in my real-world job,” said Syndey Burchell, an alumna of the ETSU College of Public Health.