NSU: HEALTH EMPOWERMENT THROUGH CULTURAL AWARENESS
Through many health initiatives, Dr. Shelia Ward has supported norfolk state university students, faculty and staff, and its surrounding community.
Dr. Shelia Ward’s educational background in exercise physiology, epidemiology/public health, and dance, has served as her foundation to promote ‘Health Empowerment through Cultural Awareness,’ the guiding principle from which she conducts scholarly activities related to chronic disease prevention and management, injury prevention and rehabilitation, and African Diaspora dance for health and wellness.
Dr. Ward, who has been with NSU since 1995, is a professor in the Department of Health, Physical Education, and Exercise Science, the Chair of Education and Clinical Experience for the Kinesiotherapy Program, and the project director for the NSU Health and Wellness Initiative for Women where she oversees the Student Health Ambassadors.
She is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, a Virginia Commission for the Arts Teaching Dance Artist, Co-director of Eleone Dance Theatre of Philadelphia, a consultant for the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning through the Arts, and Certified Instructor for Kariamu Welsh’s Umfundalai African Dance Technique and the Katherine Dunham Technique and Philosophy where she serves as the Pedagogy Chair for the Institute for Dunham Technique Certification.
In her practices, Dr. Ward promotes the use of African Diaspora Dance and Drumming as a strategy for health, wellness, and rehabilitation practices across the lifespan where participants engage in an African diaspora movement experience with live drumming to enhance mental, physical, social, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
Throughout her career at NSU, she received grants to externally fund her many initiatives. In 2017, she was awarded a grant from the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for High Impact HIV Prevention. In 2022, the VDH and CDC gave her a grant for the NSU project, ECHO, that reduces campus sexual and domestic violence. With this grant, the Virginia HBCU Collective on Campus Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence brought together faculty members from Virginia’s four HBCUs leveraged resources and expertise to address this issue. They created the Virginia HBCU Collective Campus and Sexual Violence Programming and Policy Evaluation and Assessment Chart, which is a 56-item tool created and used to collect data from campus staff and administrators whose primary jobs related to campus well-being and safety.
Dr. Ward’s most recent grant is VAX Facts by Us 4 Us: Community Driven and Developed Messaging to Address Vaccine Hesitancy in Black Communities. With this endeavor, she launched the 2023 NSU Health and Wellbeing Survey, where data was collected from 900 NSU undergraduate students related to sexual health and sexual assault prevention, substance abuse, and overall health and wellness. This campus-specific data will be used to inform programming and policies. Along with this grant, the Vaccinate Virginia media campaign is currently running, which includes bus, and mall and billboard advertisements. This campaign prioritizes three subpopulations within the African American community, college students, congregants, and the LGBTQ+ communities.
Outside of her grant work, Dr. Ward is a Student Health Ambassador Health Promotion and Research Trainee. As Student Health Ambassadors, student trainees from any major will be trained to provide health education and promotion activities to support wellness, healthy life choices, and behavior changes to students, faculty/staff, and the community. The health education promotion activities and/or projects on campus are based on chronic disease prevention and management, including the use of Cultural Arts, HIV/AIDS and STIs Education and Prevention and its intersectionality, and preventing sexual violence.
