All over Milwaukee, organizations big and small are working toward improving the health of their community. But to do that, they have to understand what the community actually needs. That’s where Kaija Zusevics comes in.
Zusevics is a researcher at the Center for Urban Population Health, a partnership between the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and the Advocate Aurora Research Institute. She works at the intersection of data collection and community action, gathering evidence that helps hospital systems, nonprofits and other institutions decide how to focus their resources.
“I like hearing what’s behind the data,” she said. “What are people saying? What are people experiencing that doesn’t seem as stark until you hear the words?”
The path to public health
Zusevics originally set out to become a health educator. But as an undergraduate student at UW-Madison, she found that she wanted to work more broadly in the community. Luckily, her minor in health education — and a nudge from her advisor — pointed her toward community health. She took an internship with the Department of Public Instruction’s Wellness and Prevention office and then stayed on for a summer job. In those roles, she evaluated grant applications, curricula and other aspects of school wellness programs for the state.
“I had never really thought about this other aspect of health education,” she said. After that, she earned her master’s in public health from UW-La Crosse. “I just fell in love with it,” she said. “Public health explains so much of our world, it connects to everything.”
Zusevics then earned her PhD and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in public and community health from the Medical College of Wisconsin. Today, she is an adjunct professor at MCW and a public health researcher with the Center for Urban Population Health.
Assessing the needs of a city
At the center, Zusevics recently led qualitative data collection for the Milwaukee Health Care Partnership’s Community Health Needs Assessment. Conducted every three years in partnership with Milwaukee’s major health systems and local health departments, the effort aims to identify the county’s most pressing health challenges.
Zusevics designed and ran focus groups and interviews with health system leaders and community members across Milwaukee County, listening for trends that might not show up in a spreadsheet.
The assessment identified five top health needs facing Milwaukeeans: violence, mental health, substance use, chronic disease, and maternal and child health. Health systems use the findings to shape new initiatives: for example, training for clinicians or strategies for screening patients and connecting them to available resources.
Embedded in the community
Zusevics doesn’t just collect the data and hand it off. One of her longest-standing partnerships is with Milwaukee’s African American Breastfeeding Network, where she has served as an evaluator and collaborator on a series of grants. Most recently, that work has centered on the WeRISE Community Doula Program, which pairs pregnant people — primarily Black and Hispanic mothers — with trained community doulas: non-medical care providers who offer emotional and informational support before, during and after birth.
What started as a small pilot serving about 30 mothers now receives hundreds of referrals each month — more than the program can currently meet. Along the way, the program has successfully pushed hospital systems to allow doulas to be present without counting against the limited number of people a patient is permitted to have with them during labor and delivery.
Zusevics’ commitment to community-centered research extends beyond maternal health. She interviewed survivors of gun violence and the families of victims for UWM’s Voices of Gun Violence project, which collected and published online the stories of residents who had experienced gun violence firsthand.
The project has wrapped, but Zusevics continues to do community-based gun violence work. She meets with Milwaukee middle schoolers to discuss their experiences and what they can do on an individual level to make a difference through a facilitated, group-based dialogue. It’s part of an early-stage effort with Carroll University and Mothers Against Gun Violence called “Resilient Voices.”
“The hard work on any of these issues is not done by me — the community organizations are doing the heavy lifting,” she said. Zusevics estimates that over the 11 years in her role, she’s been involved in almost 20 projects that have collectively provided over $5 million to community partnerships, organizations and individuals.
“My job is to help the community gather data that matters to them, analyze it and discuss it with them,” she said. “That way they can use it to inform their work and receive additional grant funding to keep their momentum going.”
