By Kay Labella
For Pride Month, the PSPDG blog is collaborating with students from LTBGS and Lambda Grads for a series of posts highlighting the LGBTQ+ community and related matters at Penn and beyond.
Founded in 2022 by Dr. José Bauermeister, the Eidos LGBTQ+ Health Initiative was created to address persistent health disparities facing LGBTQ+ communities. PSPDG, in collaboration with LTBGS, was fortunate enough to interview Kevin Schott, Eidos’ Director of Engagement, about this fantastic partnership that aims to streamline turning academic research into social impact.
Could you tell us more about the history of Eidos and why it was founded?
Kevin Schott (KS): Currently, fewer than 1% of the National Institute of Health’s research projects address LGBTQ+ health. For every $100 awarded to philanthropic foundations, only 23 cents goes to LGBTQ+ projects. And of the $2.1 trillion invested in startups, only 0.5% went to LGBT+ founders. These numbers don’t add up when LGBTQ+ people make up more than 7% of the US population (and 25% of Gen Z). Eidos supports LGBTQ+ health endeavors by providing research and consulting services as well as connecting a network of motivated creators, researchers, and experts.
What is your role with Eidos?
KS: My role is to connect Eidos with a wide-ranging constellation of people. I meet with students, startup founders, researchers, community organizations and others to find ways of connecting them with resources and they need and opportunities to meet one another.
What is the overall mission of Eidos as an organization?
KS: The Eidos LGBTQ+ Health Initiative cultivates and engages emerging and experienced leaders from community, academic, civic and business spheres to create innovative solutions for the LGBTQ+ community. We use social enterprise, community engagement, education, and research to further the sustained well-being of the LGBTQ+ community. Eidos sees a world where community experiences, diverse partnerships, thought leaders, and public health science join to advance the wellbeing of the LGBTQ+ community.
How does Eidos evaluate the prospective healthcare needs of the LGBTQIA+ community when developing healthcare solutions?
KS: Eidos supports evidence backed health interventions. When we review health projects, we look to see that they are based on up-to-date research and that their proposed solutions are grounded in evidence. We want to support and scale things that have been shown to work.
What role does Eidos hope to play in supporting LGBTQIA+-focused research? What are some projects/initiatives that are currently underway?
KS: Research is central to Eidos’s plan to support health for queer communities. We have a small team of researchers here who undertake focused research for our partners and clients. We’re very proud of their work on an app called imi. They did testing to verify the efficacy of imi to help LGBTQ+ teens develop affirmation and coping skills.
What are some resources and opportunities offered by Eidos to help healthcare workers become more educated in caring for the LGBTQIA+ community?
KS: Cultural competency and humility are important aspects of care that Eidos is working to support. Earlier this year we hosted a virtual panel discussion on this issue. You can watch the video here. Following the session we distributed notes for people interested in engaging more with this topic.
Eidos seems to sit at the intersection of many fields of research and draws people from a variety of backgrounds with regards to training. How do you feel this benefits the organization?
KS: Eidos is designed to be extremely interdisciplinary. We don’t think that any group or discipline has a monopoly on good ideas or useful skills. In fact, the history of LGBTQ+ health and culture is a testament to the amazing abilities of people from all different backgrounds. Drawing from many areas allows us to mobilize as many people as we can, draw from the largest possible pool of ideas and inspirations, and creates a network to accelerate the testing and dissemination of the best practices. We need all of those things to improve the health disparities that we currently see.
How does Eidos hope to engage the LGBTQIA+ community at Penn?
KS: We hope we can engage the LGBTQIA+ community at Penn through meaningful connections and programming. Students, staff, and faculty have different needs, but we’d like to work with them all. We currently host a series of talks for faculty members interested in hearing about LGBTQ+ projects going on at schools outside their own. We hosted our first student event for Grad students in April. I’ve been able to connect staff members with speakers for campus events.
Everyone has unique needs and goals for themselves. I’ve already heard from students that want more opportunities to engage with faculty. From staff I’ve heard that they’d like more ways to support community organizations. From faculty I know that they’d like more support integrating LGBTQ+ resources into their classes. There’s lot of ways we can help. It all starts with a connection and a conversation.
What are some of the professional programs or activities organized by Eidos to promote diversity and inclusion in the STEM field?
KS: We have a few programs designed to encourage LGBTQ+ participation in STEM. First, we host a virtual speaker series that presents issues relevant to LGBTQ+ communities highlighting speakers from the community. We are also taking part in the SUMR internship program to support high quality internships for STEM to under-represented groups.
What impact do you hope Eidos will have on Penn and the surrounding community? How do you see this growing over time?
KS: I hope to see a community of LGBTQ+ health practitioners in Philadelphia that form a full, healthy ecosystem of innovation. This means bringing together people with different skills so that we can bring forth new approaches, rigorously test them, work with communities to implement them, spread the word about our successes, and scale them across the country.
How do you see Eidos improving health outcomes for the LGBTQIA+ community?
KS: In many ways my hope for improving health is really boring. It would be great for Eidos to help researchers come up with standards of care that cover LGBTQ+ patients, so that if you get sick, doctors have evidence backed plans to help you get better. I would love for Eidos to help medical trials to include a wide variety of LGBTQ+ identities, so that when new treatments are developed, we know that they are safe, effective, and appropriate. It would be amazing for Eidos to consult on products and services that support health and wellness and are developed by teams that include queer representation so that instead of adapting solutions for queer people after the fact, they are part of the plan from day 1. And if all or any of these things happen the people who benefit from them might never know that Eidos did the research, or advised the creators.
If you’d like to learn more about Eidos, their role supporting the LGBTQ+ community, and their commitment to a person-focused approach, check out this article from the Daily Pennsylvanian, as well as Eidos’ website.
