AREP Fellows help streamline Avalon Housing’s client intake process

The Anti-Racist and Health Equity Program’s three most recent fellows, Ezekiel Medina, Mariya Bahrenburg and Shemya Gilmore, have spent considerable time helping Avalon Housing in Ann Arbor improve its client intake process to be more effective, trauma-informed, and equitable to all people. 

Bahrenburg and Gilmore served as fellows for a year while Medina served a fellowship for two years.

Not only that, the fellows, who recently completed their work with AREP, said they gained leadership skills, self-confidence, a new way of conducting research, a greater ability to work as a team, and learned how academic experience can be applied to help community organizations better serve clients.

“The AREP fellows have worked tirelessly to produce holistic, actionable findings that have the potential to transform Avalon’s housing intake system,” said AREP co-director Paul Chandanabhumma, Ph.D., MPH, assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine. “Their contributions have strengthened our partnership with Avalon considerably by collaborating in ways that promote antiracist principles and practices in our work.”

AREP formed its partnership with Avalon in 2022 with the goal of advancing anti-racist, resilience-building and trauma-informed approaches to address the impact of housing insecurities on the health of families served by Avalon. 

Avalon Housing was established in 1992 and provides services to approximately 200 families per year. It offers affordable, multi-site housing in Washtenaw County. Staff often see individuals who have been homeless outside or in emergency shelters for at least a year, experience at least one disability, and have waited six months or longer for a referral to Avalon, according to officials. 

Its mission is to build healthy, safe and inclusive supportive housing communities as a long-term solution to homelessness. 

“It was a pleasure working with Ezekiel, Shemya, and Mariya,” said Bryant Hepp, Avalon Housing evaluation and innovation manager. “It can take a lot of relational skills to engage in community-based research, and the team was patient, communicative, and open to feedback through our work together.

The goal of the fellows’ work was to assess how Avalon employees (such as support coordinators and team leads) utilize and view the annual assessment and intake forms, and to provide comprehensive recommendations for enhancing these procedures.

The fellows generated a report describing their qualitative methods and findings; a codebook describing themes and illustrative quotes from interviews; a data matrix that allows for comparisons across intake and assessment forms, and a matrix user guide. They presented Avalon these deliverables in late 2025, with many recommendations to improve the intake and client needs assessment process, informed by anti-racist research and scholarship. 

Gilmore, a U-M graduate of the School of Health Information Sciences, comes from a strong background in quantitative research methodology and an interest in providing community members equitable access to services. She commented that doing qualitative interviews among AREP staff was enlightening for her. 

“Working on the interviews, I saw how the information changed through qualitative interviewing and how our interview styles drew out different information,” she said. “It was just fun to experience that. Having a taste of qualitative research really blossomed my interest in mixed methods. I’d like to be able to bring in qualitative data with quantitative data.” 

Bahrenburg, who recently completed her master’s degree in U-M's School of Public Health, works as a program assistant for the university’s Future Public Health Leaders Program. She said she was able to put into practice what she had learned in the classroom. She added that due to her strong commitment to housing justice, her work with Avalon was an excellent fit. span>

"Academia and research institutes have an obligation to the community,” she said. “It’s important to me to address housing justice. Being able to work on this project as a community partner has been meaningful to me.” 

Medina, who just completed a dual master's in public health and social work at U-M, was the first AREP fellow and started the work with Avalon. He said that having a lot of freedom to conceive of the project – as well as writing the study protocol, securing IRB approval via the AREP team’s help, putting recruitment in place, and delivering the final report with Bahrenburg and Gilmore -- was “amazing.”span> 

“It’s given me a new way of contributing to the work of bringing equity to people and communities,” he said, adding that the fellowship allowed him to combine his academic work with a practical knowledge of what was happening in the community from a structural perspective when it came to housing.  

“This fellowship offered me a way to work directly with clients but also to interact with a community organization to bring about structural change,” he said. “I’ve learned that research can be used for equity and justice if we can employ tactics and strategies,” such as those outlined in the final report.  

Hepp of Avalon Housing said he was impressed by the quality of the work performed by the AREP fellows, especially their ability to bridge academic and professional settings and communicate their findings to Avalon's varied team of stakeholders. 

“Our work with AREP helps us better serve our clients by making the intake process less repetitive and more relational,” Hepp said. “By eliminating duplicative data collection points, we can better show clients that we are listening to them and that we respect the trust they place in us when they share their stories and personal information.  

“By asking more open-ended assessment questions, we can use that information to provide more relevant services during a critical period of transition into supportive housing and out of homelessness.” 

He added that Avalon staff will be implementing the fellows’ recommendations in several stages -- first, by combining some of the organization’s data collection points so that staff can collect data one time during the intake process. Second, Avalon staff will use the time, attentional, and relational resources saved by removing client intake redundancies to ask more open-ended and holistic assessment questions in line with the AREP fellows’ recommendations.   

Despite major changes in federal funding, higher education, public health, and housing policy, “our long-term partnership with a research institution like AREP continues to shine a spotlight on best practices at the intersection of healthcare, housing, and human rights,” Hepp said. “AREP's support has helped us feel more confident that we are navigating those changes in a way that is true not only to our values, but to a shared external reality.”