What if the best prescription for a patient's health wasn'ta medication, but a lawyer?

Attorney Kirby Mitchell, Director of the UpstateMedical-Legal Partnership and a Furman alumnus, joins Dr. Kerry Sease to explore how Medical-Legal Partnerships bring civil legal aid directly into healthcare settings, tackling the legal issues that quietly harm people's health: unstable housing, denied benefits, unsafe conditions, and more.

Using the IHELP framework (Income, Health, Education, Legalstatus, Personal stability), Kirby shares real-world cases showing why collaboration between doctors and lawyers is the "secret sauce" behind this innovative model. Together, they discuss moving upstream to catch problems early and why treating the whole person, not just the symptom, leadsto better outcomes. Together, they highlight how removing barriers to care opens the door to real opportunities for improved health.

A powerful conversation about what's possible when twoprofessions unite around one purpose: helping people and communities thrive.

Link to the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership: https://www.medical-legalpartnership.org/

In this episode of the Community Health Exchange, host Melissa Fair speaks with Monty Robertson, Executive Director of the Alliance for a Healthier South Carolina (https://healthiersc.org), about the power and complexity of cross-sector partnership in advancing community health. Drawing on their parallel journeys from clinical care into public health leadership, the two explore why health outcomes are shaped as much by housing, transportation, and economic stability as by clinical care, and why meaningful progress demands collaboration well beyond the traditional healthcare sector. Robertson offers an inside look at the Alliance's work developing South Carolina's State Health Improvement Plan and its Collective Impact in Action initiative, which aligns community health needs assessments and improvement plans across the state while ensuring local expertise drives statewide strategy. The conversation highlights hard-won lessons on building trust, navigating competing organizational priorities, and sustaining momentum in work that is, as Robertson puts it, "a marathon, not a sprint." Listeners will come away with a clear-eyed yet hopeful perspective on what it takes to move from good intentions to genuine, lasting collective impact.

Carey Rothschild and Lillie Hall join us on this episode to discuss the new IACH Community Health Digital Badge in partnership with the SC Center for Rural and Primary Healthcare.

Carey serves as the Director of Community Health Policy and Strategy of the Spartanburg Regional System, and Lillie is the Community Engagement Director at the Department of Public Health Upstate. They will both serve as faculty for this course.

IACH Director of Education Loretta Crowley guides listeners through an interview about the importance of the non-clinical side of health and community-informed education, as well as how these modules will help raise knowledge in these areas across the South Carolina community.

“If it’s not equal for one of us, it’s not equal for any of us.”

Ma’ta Crawford, a Certified Community Health Worker, has never been able to leave her field of health equity work — she says there is always more work to be done.  

She serves as a member of the HEAL (Health Equity Action Leadership) Board, a community-led advisory board supported by LiveWell Greenville and the Institute for the Advancement of Community Health at Furman University. The board is composed of diverse community leaders and residents who work to advance health equity and improve health outcomes across Greenville County.

Through relationship-building, advocacy, and community engagement, the HEAL Board seeks to strengthen trust, build community capacity to influence larger systems, and elevate community voices in decision-making processes.

In this episode, IACH Researcher Jody Teel sits down with Ma'ta to explore:

• What makes the HEAL Board feel like a family to her 

• Why she continues to show up for this work, even when it is difficult

• Her favorite memories from working with her team

Ma'ta shares her core values around learning from people with lived experience, building trust, and moving through life with an open mind while staying true to yourself.

At the IACH, we help students gain meaningful experiences in their fields that deepen their academic learning and ignite a passion for community health.

In this episode, Health Careers Internship Coordinator Rebecca Haffen sits down with Will Hutson — a graduating senior Public Health major and Community Health Champion at Furman University — to talk about his journey in community health, hands-on internship experience at a physical therapy clinic, and his summer as an IACH Summer Fellow at Sustaining Way.

Will shares how he connected his shadowing experience to his public health classes, and offers practical advice for Furman students looking to make the most of internship and fellowship opportunities. 

Research suggests that the health risks associated with social isolation are comparable to those of smoking, obesity, and alcohol use, yet many modern communities are not structured to foster meaningful in-person interaction.

In this episode, Dr. Kerry Sease is joined in the podcast studio by Risa Wilkerson, Executive Director of Healthy Places by Design. Together they discuss how Healthy Places By Design works to advance community-led, place-based strategies to strengthen social cohesion and explore practical ways to embed connection into the infrastructure of ev

Even the best research can end up excluding the very communities it aims to serve. Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) is different — it’s rooted in collaboration and "power-sharing." Communities are a part of each step of the research process, and the partnership continues after the research concludes.

Postdoctoral training coordinator Meghan Richmond talks to IACH Postdoctoral fellows Kinsey Meggett and Abass Babatunde to explore what CBPR actually is, and what it isn't.

They’ll discuss how practicing CBPR at the IACH allows researchers to bring findings directly back to the community, creates opportunities for co-learning, and ultimately strengthens the quality of their findings.

Neuroscience major Kadence Alexander brought her studies in neuroscience beyond the classroom by working with children at The Phoenix Center’s Serenity Place, a live-in treatment center for women with substance use disorder that provides on-site childcare. Her position helped breathe real life experiences into the content she was learning about in the classroom and inspired her to ask more questions in her upper-level psychology courses and lead a toy drive on campus for the children she works with.

Rebecca Haffen, the Health Careers Internship Coordinator, first connected with Kadence when she was looking for an engaged learning opportunity to gain experience working with children on her journey to medical school and a possible future career as a pediatric ENT. In this episode, they chat about the takeaways from blending coursework with an internship, what made Kadence's experience personal, and the advice she offers her peers.

This week, Dr. Gabriela Abrego, a research associate at the IACH, joins Dr. Shaniece Criss, Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Director of the Master of Arts in Advocacy and Social Policy at Furman University. They discuss the ways in which they incorporated community voice and lived experiences into the CHAMPS study.

CHAMPS is an interdisciplinary medical-legal partnership of the University of South Carolina School of Law. Dr. Criss and Dr. Abrego highlight what a "medical-legal partnership" looks like in action, the value of community voice in this work, and what their qualitative research is revealing regarding the impact of CHAMPS services on local communities.  

In the inaugural episode of The Community Health Exchange, we introduce the impact of seeing health beyond the individual level. Looking at health in community allows us to understand the exam room as just one piece of the puzzle, and medicine as more than a pill.

This episode features Dr. Saria Saccocio — Chief Medical Officer of Essence Healthcare, and volunteer physician — as she sits down with Dr. Kerry Sease, Executive Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Community Health (IACH).

While clinical training often focuses on the individual, this conversation explores how addressing social drivers of health makes those individual treatments more effective. Dr. Sease shares how finding this perspective was central to her transition to the IACH at Furman University and discusses how her work now bridges the gap between treating the patient and serving the community.