Commissioners Visit ETSU Valleybrook Campus

Randy Boyd, Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development, and Dr. John Dreyzehner, Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Health, visited the College of Public Health programs at the ETSU Valleybrook campus.

All of the College of Public Health activities at Valleybrook are part of “Project EARTH,” with EARTH standing for "Employing Available Resources to Transform Health.”  The under-lying concept behind Project EARTH is that wherever public health graduates go in the world, they have to be able to use the local resources to impact people’s health.

While at Valleybrook, the Commissioners learned about the major on-going projects which are part of Project EARTH, including the ESSENTIALS course, the SKILLS experiences, the VILLAGE and the proposed VIRTUE research program.

The ESSENTIALS (Essential Skills, Strategies, and Expertise Necessary To Improve and Advance Low-resource Settings) course–is a hands-on, interactive, three-credit-hour course in which students learn to make a variety of products to address basic needs in low-resource areas, and more importantly, develop critical thinking skills, innovation, and teamwork. 

SKILLS (Short-term Knowledge, Immersion-Learning, and Leadership Skills) experiences are a series of half- to multi-day intensive immersion experiences that introduce participants to many of the same skills learned in the ESSENTIALS course. 

Once completed, the VILLAGE (Virtual International Living and Learning  Across Global Environments) will be an “international village” that will include accurate replicas of how people live in different parts of the world, a teaching pavilion, and a third world clinic.  Together they will serve as a “real world simulation” experience for students. 

The proposed VIRTUE (Valleybrook Institute for Research on Technologies for Under-served Environments) will create an opportunity for students to work with each other, with faculty, and with industry partners, to find solutions to some of the basic health challenges that impact low-resource areas. 

The Commissioners were taken on a tour of the facility by Dr. Mike Stoots and several students who demonstrated a range of Project EARTH activities.  The Commissioners shared their thoughts and ideas about the importance of the innovative Project EARTH activities and ways in which they might most effectively serve the needs of students and others in Tennessee.