Mary L. Ohmer

Community organizing Violence prevention Community solutions to violence and trauma Community development Equitable development CBPR Dr. Ohmer conducts research and evaluation on a variety of community-based projects and initiatives. Her research areas include civic engagement and participation, evaluation research and intervention research focused on facilitating community capacity to address substantive neighborhood problems. She is currently working as Co-PI with Dr. Shannah Tharp-Gilliam at Homewood Children’s Village on the Research for Equity and Power Project, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project which has engaged youth and adult Homewood residents to facilitate civic engagement around equitable development issues. The project has resulted in an Equitable Development Playbook, which is being widely shared with the Homewood and greater Pittsburgh community. The project will also be replicated in 2021 in Hazelwood, in collaboration with the Hazelwood Initiative and Center of Life. This project is also in collaboration with Pitt’s Community Engagement Centers, and guided by resident led community advisory boards. Dr. Ohmer is also working on two community-level violence prevention projects. The first project is a collaboration with the Perry Hilltop and Fineview Citizens Councils (Joanna Deming, Executive Director, Co-Investigator) to replicate and extend an intervention Dr. Ohmer implemented in Atlanta, GA that facilitated collective efficacy among youth and adult residents to prevent community violence. The current project also focuses on improving community mental health outcomes impacted by exposure to community and youth violence. This project uses CBPR methods and is guided by a resident led community advisory board. Dr. Ohmer is also a Co-investigator for the Child/Youth Thriving Matrix, Community-level strategy to reduce youth violence project in collaboration with the Dr. Liz Miller (PI), Dr. Alison Culyaba and Dr. Anna Ettinger from the UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, as well as Dr. Jamil Bey from Urbankind Institute and Rev. Paul Abernathy from the Neighborhood Resilience Project. The project engages youth and adult residents and stakeholders from two Pittsburgh communities to assess dimensions of child thriving related to youth violence. The project is intended to increase collective self-efficacy, promote emotional wellbeing, and reduce social isolation among supportive adults and youth, and reduce youth violence in racially segregated neighborhoods. The results of these two projects will contribute to a greater understanding of how community level interventions can facilitate collective efficacy and community supports for the prevention of youth violence and the promotion of community wellbeing. Dr. Ohmer has also conducted program evaluation research on numerous community-based initiatives and programs sponsored by a variety of organizations, including Pitt’s Office of Child Development, Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Pittsburgh, and Families First in Atlanta.