Our Collaborators
COVID Straight Talk is the product of our partnerships with incredible experts and organizations.
Given this effort’s interdisciplinary goals, we teamed up with a wide-ranging set of collaborators. We worked with community organizers, disaster response specialists, lawyers protecting low-wage workers, emergency room doctors, and building scientists.
We are extra grateful to our advisor Nathaniel Raymond who was the inspiration behind our team’s decision to focus on air safety. His work on past respiratory viruses enabled us to accelerate our execution with confidence.
Our advisor Sabrina Brockman’s compassion and leadership inspired us to be as deliberate and accessible with our choice of language as possible when writing early drafts of our toolkits so that we made sure to meet readers where they are. Doing so ensures that our resources not only reach as many people as possible but are also as helpful as possible for their lived experiences.
We worked closely with our partner Forward Together to co-develop content and co-promote each other’s resources. We contributed the recommendations and guides on air safety to We Keep Each Other Safe, a guide produced by Forward Together written for Black, LatinX, and Indigenous communities working indoors and living in multi-occupancy homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forward Together wrote the guide on Voting for COVID Straight Talk. We will also feature their guide of pregnancy feature their guide of pregnancy in the next site update.
Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg advised us on all the content related to air safety. His explanations for the Air hacks enabled us to offer actionable recommendations for workers backed up by research on indoor air safety. His generosity is a model for how academic researchers can contribute their expertise to public knowledge.
We received input on the Get M.A.D. Survey from several reviewers, including United 4 Respect, Professor Lydia Bourouiba at MIT and our advisor Professor Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg.
We created the Worker’s Legal Health and Safety Rights Guide with the guidance of The National Employment Law Project (NELP). Their expertise on OSHA mandates helped us navigate dense legal documents.
Given that all of Last Mile’s projects are volunteer-run, there is no way we could have launched this without the help of the many volunteers who stepped in. Whether it was for one day or several months, one phone call or 30 Zoom calls, we are grateful to all of the dedicated volunteers for their compassion and generosity.
PARTNERS
Our partners have generously donated a lot of time to bring COVID Straight Talk to life.
ADVISORS
Our advisors have generously offered their time to us to make COVID Straight Talk actionable and science-based.
Dr. Lupita Montoya
Member of the American Association for Aerosol Research, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science
Dr. Linsey Marr
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Applied Interdisciplinary Research in Air, Virginia Tech
Dr. Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg
Professor at the University of Oregon, Director of the Institute for Health in the Built Environment
Kathryn Finney
Entrepreneur, Investor
White House Champion of Change
Dr. Jarrad Hampton-Marcell
Research Associate, University of Illinois Colorado
Dr. Shelly Miller
Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder
Dr. Jose-Luis Jimenez
Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
Patti Giglio
PR strategist, PSG Com
Dr. Amy Aminlari
Emergency Room Physician and Last Mile San Diego Founder and Lead
Kevin Slavin
Advisor, Phylagen.
Former Lead, Pandemic Task Force and VP Marketing, Crossover Health
Dr. Lydia Bourouibia
Professor and Director of The Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Faculty, Affiliate Faculty of Harvard Medical School
Sean Griffin
CEO of Disaster Technologies Incorporated, ex-Director for Incident Management Integration Policy at the White House NCS under Obama and Trump
Dr. Delphine Farmer
Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Colorado State University
Dr. Brent Stephens
Professor and Department Chair, Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, IIT
Dr. Smita Badhey
Emergency Room Physician in Bronx, NY
Dr. Marina Vance
Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder
Nathaniel Raymond
Lecturer in Global Affairs, Jackson Institute, Yale University
Dr. Sarp Aksel
OBGYN with Maternal Fetal Medicine Associates, NYC
Sarah Milstein
Engineering, Mailchimp
Dr. Davis Liu
Chief Clinical Officer of LemonAid Health
Harper Reed
Technologist
DJ Skelton
Kairos Alliance Group
Dr. Seema Bhangar
Indoor Air Institute
Erin Malone
Community Networks, Communications
FUNDERS
Community Networks
Our incredible community partners who are doing the groundwork of spreading the message of COVID Straight Talk. Join us as a community partner by sharing COVID Straight Talk.
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Black Lives Matter Greater NY
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Mutual Aid NYC
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Return to the Heart Foundation, 50+ tribal nations & pueblos
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504HealthNet, Louisiana
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The Breastfeeding Center and the New Orleans Birthmark Collective
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CORE Response, Louisiana
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Local 100 United Labor Unions, Louisiana
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Justice and Beyond Coalition, Louisiana
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Local 100 United Labor Unions, Texas
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Mutual Aid groups, Southern Solidarity, and The Community Fridge Initiative
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Local 100 United Labor Unions, Arkansas
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Vencerémos, Northwest Arkansas
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Bvlbancha Collective, Mississippi
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We2gether, Drew, Mississippi
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WDSV and Delta Foundation of the CDC
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The Good Neighbor Project, Barrio Logan, San Diego
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Casa Familiar, San Diego
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San Ysidro Health Clinics, San Diego
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Encinitas4Equality (Encinitas Black Lives Matter), Encinitas
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The Chicano Federation, San Diego
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Community Resource Center, San Diego
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Alpha Project (homeless shelters), San Diego
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Mission San Luis Rey Parish Food Bank, San Diego
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Father Joe’s Village Homeless Shelters, San Diego