Dr. Kelsie Okamura, PIKO Pilot Year 1 awardee, receives the NIH Director’s Pioneer (DP1) award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)

Congratulations to Dr. Kelsie Okamura, PIKO Pilot Year 1 awardee, for receiving the NIH Director’s Pioneer (DP1) award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). This five-year grant award for $4,250,000 focuses on implementing a drug-prevention curriculum in Oahu public schools.  She will be working with Dr. Scott Okamoto, PIKO’s PPP Director, on this grant.  Congratulations Dr. Okamura!

Project Title: Community-driven drug prevention implementation strategies for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth in rural Hawaii.

Project Summary: I am an implementation scientist, youth substance use and mental health services researcher, clinical psychologist, and descendant of Okinawan-Japanese immigrants to Hawaiʻi. I propose to use a community based participatory research approach to study the implementation of a culturally grounded substance use prevention curriculum, Ho‘ouna Pono. The intervention has been created, evaluated, and spread through several NIDA-funded grants to address the high rates of substance use in Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth, especially in rural areas. Our work has revealed that many implementation barriers intersect at the youth, family, and teacher levels, indicating a pressing need for community-led implementation efforts. In this Racial Equity Initiative Visionary Award, I propose an innovative combination of implementation science and participatory methods to spread and sustain Ho‘ouna Pono in the Windward District of the Hawaiʻi State Department of Education. I hypothesize that Ho‘ouna Pono adoption and sustainability will increase by using community-led innovation tournaments, which actively promote engagement and ownership in the implementation process. I also hypothesize that real-time assessments of implementation through ecological momentary assessment will enable rapid and accurate implementation and intervention adaptation. These two innovative approaches have never been tested for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth living in geographically remote and rural areas, making this a novel high-risk, high-reward study. Moreover, this is the first study to use ecological momentary assessment to facilitate implementation of youth substance use prevention.

I intend to challenge the existing research paradigm through this Racial Equity Initiative Visionary Award through redistributing power to community to lead the research effort. Traditionally, implementation science and research has privileged the researchers’ voice, often leading to highly controlled, community-based studies that create mistrust in the scientific process and produce unsustainable interventions with limited community acceptability. These concerns are even more pronounced in populations that have systematically been the focus of increased scientific inquiry, like indigenous and rural populations. The impact of this paradigm-shifting project has the potential to change how implementation research is conducted by putting community in the leadership role. Furthermore, it will build scientific skills and expertise directly into the community to foster ongoing implementation and generalizability toward future implementation efforts. It is imperative that studies with the potential for reshaping institutional structures and systems be conducted to further advance racial equity, especially for Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander youth. The proposed study addresses this imperative.

For more information, see the press release from the Baker Center for Children and Families.

Grant Award Number DP1 DA061311

The information reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number DP1 DA061311. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.