Psychology & Philanthropy In Action with Dr. Amy Hyoeun Lee: Community-Partnered Implementation

At APF, we’re bringing together the shared power of psychology and philanthropy to create a world where people are healthy, happy, and living with dignity. Through APF Direct Action, we’re supporting innovative interventions, based in psychological knowledge, that directly address pressing needs of communities.

We’re catching up with Dr. Amy Hyoeun Lee, APF Direct Action Visionary Grant recipient. Dr. Lee’s work exemplifies the shared power of psychology and philanthropy, putting evidence-based psychological interventions into practice within communities that need them most.

Dr. Lee’s project, Task-Shifting for Equitable Trauma-Focused Care: Community-Partnered Implementation of STAIR with Caregivers, builds on an established community partnership with Dr. Lee’s Lab for Youth Trauma Recovery and S.T.R.O.N.G. Youth, a local organization in Long Island specializing in youth gun and gang violence prevention.

With funding from APF, Dr. Lee’s team is expanding access to a brief, skills-focused trauma intervention for parents and caregivers served by S.T.R.O.N.G. Youth, strengthening generational resilience and youth-focused prevention efforts. Because marginalized communities experience disproportionately high rates of interpersonal and intergenerational trauma, this work emphasizes close collaboration with community partners to ensure trauma-focused care is accessible, culturally responsive, and sustainable.

Can you tell us a little about The Lab for Youth Trauma Recovery, and how the partnership with S.T.R.O.N.G. Youth came about?

The Lab for Youth Trauma Recovery was founded at Hofstra University in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. Program, and is now based in John Jay College/Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). We conduct community-engaged and community-partnered research to address trauma-related mental health disparities for youth and communities of color. Our recent projects have focused on culturally tailoring existing trauma-focused interventions and testing innovative delivery methods like task-shifting to improve engagement and access. 

Our partner in this APF-funded project is S.T.R.O.N.G. Youth (hereafter STRONG), a local youth gun and gang violence prevention organization located just down the road from Hofstra University in Long Island, New York. All credit for initiating our partnership goes to Lillian Alford, a rising 5^th year student in the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at Hofstra University, who simply walked into the STRONG office on behalf of our lab and asked to meet with the leadership!

Have you seen any early outcomes or emerging insights from participants or caregivers that speak to the program’s impact, and are there any particular observations, stories, or feedback you’ve received from participants that stand out to you?   

We are already learning so much about what it takes to implement a brief (5-session) evidence-based, trauma-focused intervention (Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation (STAIR); Cloitre et al., 2006) within a community context.   

As a preparation step, we delivered STAIR with 6 STRONG staff members this spring. In close collaboration with STRONG leadership, we decided that this step was necessary to enhance buy-in for the intervention and to improve burnout and turnover rates among staff, which have historically been high. This would help ensure the eventual success with uptake and sustained delivery of STAIR. STRONG staff members are not licensed mental health professionals and yet work as prevention and “intervention” specialists with youth and families in school districts in Long Island most severely affected by systemic inequalities, including racism, community violence, limited funding, and school absenteeism. The staff group was co-facilitated by members of the research team and the director of programs at STRONG. It was a delight to see some of the skills “stick” with staff members to manage work-related stressors, many of which are trauma-related, in real time. While preliminary, we have some promising pre- and post-group data showing reductions in secondary traumatic stress and burnout among participating staff members. 

What have you learned so far about what most meaningfully supports caregivers from communities like Hempstead in accessing and engaging with trauma-focused care?

To be useful in communities and other neighborhoods like Hempstead in Long Island, interventions must be acceptable to community members and doable in the local context. Caregivers and families served by STRONG have established trust and existing relationships with staff at STRONG. We have learned to lean heavily on the expertise of staff members when considering the approach, design, and evaluation procedures, which are just as critical as the research team’s expertise.

We have also learned that to address trauma in community settings, we need to invest in equipping and supporting the local workforce. At STRONG, most staff members are also community members themselves who often have direct experiences with the stressors and traumas they encounter in the families’ lives. They work daily to support caregivers and families under challenging circumstances that may activate their own histories of trauma. Thus, secondary traumatic stress and burnout are real threats to the continuity of support for the youth and families STRONG serves. 

Your project is grounded in community-based participatory research. You’re not just implementing STAIR, you’re actively refining it in real time based on feedback, and building STRONG’s capacity to sustain it independently. How has this approach shaped the work in ways a more conventional research design wouldn’t have?

Task-shifting of trauma-focused interventions has been used effectively primarily in low- and middle-income countries, where resources are low and mental health care workforce is limited (Godfrey et al., 2026). Many of our under-resourced community settings here in the U.S. share similar challenges and yet bear a disproportionately high burden of trauma. The long-term goal of this project is sustained and independent delivery of STAIR by STRONG, which will be achieved by building capacity within this organization that is already doing the work of addressing these challenges on the ground. This broader goal and our partnership with STRONG have informed every step of the project. For instance, in designing the study, we moved from a youth-focused intervention to a caregiver-focused one based on the observation that caregivers served by STRONG needed access to their own trauma-focused care before fully engaging in youth-focused interventions. In implementing the study, we introduced a novel preparation step of delivering the intervention with staff members themselves, based on STRONG leadership raising concerns about burnout and buy-in. We expect that our collaborative work will continue to be shaped and refined by both the long-term goals of this work and the observations from the ground, which is perhaps typically not how research projects are designed.

How do you plan to use the outcomes from this work to influence broader conversations, policies, or interventions surrounding mental health disparities in under-resourced communities?

Building on the work of global mental health researchers, we hope to show that task-shifting is an approach that warrants further investigation in community settings here in the U.S. More broadly, we hope that this work will spur innovation and greater collaboration in bringing trauma-focused care into communities where the need is high but access remains critically limited. If a community organization like STRONG can sustain a trauma-focused intervention like STAIR, that could have important implications for how we think about where care can happen and who is equipped to deliver it.

How has funding from the Direct Action Visionary Grants strengthened or expanded the scale of this work?

We are grateful that funding from the Direct Action Visionary Grants allowed us to launch this project, which is the culmination of 3+ years of formative work and partnership building. We are working closely with Dr. Christie Jackson, who is an expert in the STAIR intervention, to train staff and implement 5-session STAIR groups for parents/caregivers at two STRONG locations in Long Island. The grant also made it possible to compensate STRONG staff for their time on the project and to provide small gift card incentives for caregivers to encourage consistent attendance during STAIR groups.

From your perspective, what does Direct Action in psychology look like for the communities you work with?

For the communities we work with, Direct Action in psychology must be innovative, resilient, resourceful, and build on a strong foundation of trust, which those of us in the research/academic space have the responsibility of cultivating. I believe we collectively hold many of the solutions to our most pressing social challenges, like addressing the impact of childhood trauma, which has wide-ranging mental health implications. Our lab was founded on the belief that recovery from trauma is possible for all youth and communities when they have access to evidence-based interventions that work for them and their contexts. Direct Action means we collaboratively chart trajectories toward recovery with communities.

Do you have any advice for future APF Direct Action Visionary Grant applicants or other researchers who want to create a direct and meaningful impact?

Take the time to get to know your local communities and organizations. No matter what your area of expertise is within psychological science, there is a place for it where you work and live. There are people you come across daily who can benefit from your research/academic knowledge and expertise—but this must be accompanied by the knowledge, expertise, and sources of resilience that are found within communities in order to create direct and meaningful impact.

As a follow up, do you have any advice or tips for building trust within the communities your work serves?

Building trust is truly fundamental to this work. In our experience, this has required embracing humility, flexibility, and a willingness to persist on both sides. This means: 1) Seeking to understand (and re-understand) organizational priorities—both the big picture mission and the more immediate needs, which could shift over time, 2) Being able to pivot based on organizational changes and current needs while remaining grounded in the scientific evidence, and 3) Persisting in efforts to co-create impactful projects and obtain funding. Also, don’t underestimate the power of showing up in person! These may not always align with the academic incentive structure, but the tradeoff is that we get to bring psychological science into work that prioritizes real-world impact. 

This work sits at the intersection of intergenerational trauma, racial inequity, and community violence. This work is incredibly important, but can be very difficult. What helps you stay grounded and committed to the work?

My collectivistic cultural orientation is certainly protective—I try to remember that I am part of a larger collective of researchers, community members, organizational staff and leaders, and funding organizations like APF that are investing in this work. It is indeed a weighty responsibility, and yet I am bolstered by all who persisted before me and those who are currently doing the work. Some of these folks are mentors, colleagues, and graduate students in the lab with whom I am privileged to work closely. Others are influential researchers and community leaders whose impact I admire from afar. As a clinician, I also value stories of the impact of trauma-focused interventions on individual and family lives, which I get to hear most often now through my role as a supervisor. The timescale of the research end of things may be in years or decades, and yet the immediate impact of our work can be felt in weeks or months. Finally, self-care is an ethical imperative for those doing trauma-focused work, and I try to take this seriously though not always perfectly.

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