How Requity Labs works to address equity, workforce needs

Requity Labs is the vehicle through which Saint Anselm College psychology professor Dr. Loretta Brady and her partners aim to build organizational capacity, programs and tools that support communities facing adversity and specialty workforce needs.

Over two decades, Brady and her students have developed solutions for a variety of local equity, inclusion and community resilience needs. Their work has advanced ethical leadership and provided trauma and equity informed strategy for programs at Families in Transition-New Horizons, Dyn, the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, the Granite United Way as well as the state of New Hampshire and NGOs in South America, Africa and Europe.

Formalizing her efforts in 2017, Dr. Brady developed Requity Labs — the name is a combination of resilience and equity — as a dynamic research center and consultancy that advances programs and curates events and resources that help individuals, communities and organizations thrive.

Earlier this year, the lab hosted its first annual Love Your Life luncheon, showcasing the private, public and community involvement of women leaders. A Juneteenth daylong learning exchange on diversity, equity and inclusion was put off by the spring arrival of Covid-19. (Next year’s events will take place Feb. 12 and June 18.)

At the moment, Requity Labs is guiding two projects through development that could serve as psychological resources for emergency first responders and adolescents.

With a $15,000 grant from the Endowment for Health, Dr. Brady and her team will augment their work with outside technical support, providing project management, product development and game design to resources delivered in a uniquely engaging way.

Humor and play

From 2014 to 2016, Brady developed a 10-day comprehensive fitness program for members of the military, first responders and professional athletes drawn out of resilience psychology.

“I had been working with a program that would give them some information and tools to make themselves and their families more resilient to the work they’re exposed to,” said Dr. Brady. The program focused on mind, body, spirit, risks of alcohol and drug abuse, and family communication.

“But the learning format was not practical for what most first responders were allocated for training,” she said. “I was confident in what the material needed to be but not the approach.”

Setting aside the training, in early 2019, Dr. Brady picked up the project again after connecting with Jillian Rigby, an EMT and psychology undergrad at Saint Anselm, who took a course with Dr. Brady where they began to study game-based social impact interventions.

It turns out people are more receptive to addressing and understanding psychological and social issues if it’s in a game format, whether role-playing or similar to a board game.

“Difficult topics — whether because of social climate or personal journeys one has had — those are easier to approach and navigate with humor and play, with some level of informality, and there’s still a value of formal knowledge,” said Dr. Brady. “You can approach these subjects in a playful and game-based way that’s informed by the science.”

Rigby has worked with Requity Labs to pursue her interest in reducing mental health and addiction support stigma for first responders. Requity Labs brought together an assembly of professionals with backgrounds and skills that helped the role-playing resource address individual mental and physical health, interpersonal relationships and the impact of work stressors.

Dr. Brady was approached by a local Veteran Affairs research psychologist who connected them with a graduate researcher working with Minnesota firefighters at the University of Minnesota Occupational Health and Safety program.

They also have established a working relationship with theater students at York College in Pennsylvania, with Suzanne Delle, whose students have a long-running program in which role-playing actors support de-escalation training for law enforcement in their community.

“These connections have allowed us to provide compelling material that supports some of the creative game assets our partnership with students at York College are generating,” said Dr. Brady.

The end goal of the game is to cultivate communication and teach healthy coping techniques in first responders and their families, said Rigby.

The timing of the resource could be significant. In New Hampshire, effective Jan. 1, 2021, disabling post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by a first responder will be presumed work-related and eligible for workers’ compensation benefits.

Her students will host a policy roundtable on Dec. 9 with community leaders to present policy memos and white papers on topics including the trend of legislation to address worker burnout in first responders and LGBTQ mental health and school climate.

Empathy and understanding

Saint Anselm psychology students have been a resource to another creator, BF (who goes by his initials).

Building off his own and peers’ experiences, BF is working with Requity Labs on an evolving game-based teaching tool that aims to encourage empathy and understanding of the LGBTQ+ experience by walking in somebody else’s shoes and understanding culture’s role.

The original prototype was intended to be a role-playing board game with cards. Players would build their own playing pieces with some aspects of their identity self-selected and others determined by chance, tying into the tentative name, “PaperKids.”

“The action of the game is that you are role playing as a character,” said Dr. Brady. “The middle school students go through their school week or school day, and as they’re doing that, they’re learning about LGBTQ history and identifying different individuals and what they’ve accomplished. There’s so much research the game developer (BF) put into it, and providing a social module of LGBTQ history and developmental science of brains and bodies and socialization and how it genders us biologically.”

However, as Covid-19 forced St. A’s to go remote in the fall, Dr. Brady and a Requity Labs research assistant Skylar Bottcher worked closely with BF to adapt the game, so that her research methods and applied psychology students could test the game over Zoom.

“They gave me very detailed, helpful and honest feedback about what worked and didn’t, and ideas on how to improve it,” said BF.

One student suggested using a spinning wheel instead of a die to see how the body (sex), brain (gender identity) and heart (orientation) colors were being determined. BF easily built a cardboard wheel.

Brenda Noiseux, a New Hampshire resident with a software product management and indie tabletop game background, has been consulting Requity Labs and BF’s “PaperKids” as it navigates playtesting its prototype to settling on the game’s assets: design and pieces.

It’s a crucial, methodical process. “Eventually, you have to start playing this game to see if it’s fun to play. Is it challenging, are there points the game breaks, meaning you reach a point where you can’t move forward?” said Noiseux.

“Play-testing, editing, documentation — that’s a big part of game development, so those are all the ways our lab and the work with our students helps creators,” said Dr. Brady, whose students have focused on user experience, evidencebased research, best practices in social impact gaming and emerging knowledge on LGBTQ mental health that could be incorporated into the game.

“It gives my students a chance to look into some of that research and understand what some of the social and mental health supports are and what would be helpful for youth,” she said.

“(The game) has resources and information about serious issues that many people struggle with, like bullying, mental health, consent, suicide prevention and abuse,” said BF.

Currently, the game resource has been adapted for middle-schoolers in a classroom or clinical setting, but Dr. Brady sees the workforce development potential of the game as well.

“Medical providers, educators, parents, advocates: there are so many professions that are lacking in providing competent care to gender non forming and LGBTQ people,” she said.

As part of the Endowment for Health grant, Inkwell Interactive Studio, a game art and development center at Southern New Hampshire University, will provide some game design and technical support. The funds will also support intellectual property protections and structuring licensing agreements, to help the creator retain control of the assets no matter what shape the end product takes.

“We want those projects to have a life as long as they need to get their footing,” said Dr. Brady. “I want to support a creator in their journey and I hope from that they gain confidence in the project they’ve created. Creators deserve a place where they are helped as they create or iterate.”

The potential clinical impact of such playbased resources is clear. Noiseux also sees broader cultural effects, as indie games open up these topics to the public.

“Being able to see the needs in that community in addition to what I see in the indie tabletop community is what made this exciting,” said Noiseux. “Getting more underrepresented voices, bringing them to the table and bringing in neat topics is very much needed in the mass industry.”

Liisa Rajala can be reached at lrajala@nhbr.com.