Jo Anne Earp email about Carol Parks' time in the UNC Department of Health Behavior and Health Education
08:44 PM 5/22/2002
From: JoAnne Earp
To: hbhefaculty@listserv.unc.edu, hbhestaff@listserv.unc.edu,
...snip... Martha Monnett
Subject: HBHE faculty resignation
All,
It is with sadness that I write to tell you of Carol Parks Bani's decision to accept an offer as associate professor of health education in the department of public health at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. She writes, "In light of my personal and professional goals for the next several years, I believe this will be a very good move and fit for me at this time." July will be Carol's last month in HBHE.
As many of you know, Carol has been a faculty member in HBHE for the past eight years. She has been a superb mentor for many students of color, as well as many other HBHE and SPH students. She is a charismatic teacher in the classroom, and well-known as a presenter at many local, state, regional and national conferences, particularly in the areas of assets-mapping, a concept she helped put on the public health map, and for the Ministry of Health (MOH) initiative, a non-categorical, spiritually-based, holistic model of health promotion focused on training African-American ministers and congregations in health education principles. Carol has most recently taught a required course for HBHE MPH students on health education intervention methods, and an elective on populations of color. She was actively involved with the Minority Student Caucus as an advisor and in helping to plan several of the SPH's annual Minority Conferences. She served ably as vice president and president of the SPH chapter of Delta Omega, the national public health honorary society.
Carol began her tenure at UNC in a unique, and sometimes challenging, position, jointly-appointed in both the department of health behavior and health education, and in the Wake County health department, essentially in what she came to call a "professor in the hood" position. At the Southeast Raleigh Center she was supported by a W.K. Kellogg grant known as the Community-based Public Health Initative (CBPHI). Carol has been in public health for at least 16 years, many of them as a first-class practitioner; in more recent years she spent much time emphasizing research initiatives with the PRAISE project, N.C.'s Baby Love and Minority Infant Mortality Reduction projects, and most recently with the CDC-funded REACH iniative in Charlotte, where she directed community-based assessments and undertook a number of grassroots training sessions. In all her research activities, Dr. Bani's ideal was to seemlessly "mesh" as much as possible her roles as faculty member and community practitioner.
Dr. Bani will be missed by many current HBHE students and faculty, by colleagues elsewhere in the SPH and state of North Carolina, and by many, many HBHE alumni, whom she inspired during their tenure at UNC's SPH. Since she first joined our faculty in 1994, she has worked tirelessly to fulfil her commitment to students, through her teaching and service, and to have an impact on poor communities and people of color generally, and African-Americans specifically, through her research and practice. Please join me in wishing Carol much success and happiness in her new position "up North".
JAE