Fewer than 2,000 people call Pirtleville, Arizona, home. The town sits about a mile north of the U.S.-Mexico border and is known to many by its Spanish name, Pueblo Nuevo.

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Growing up there, Ada M. Wilkinson-Lee made regular trips across the border to visit family.

"I really had the best of both worlds, I can really immerse myself in both cultures," she said. "But I also saw the reality of the differences between what it's like to live in the U.S. and what it's like to live in Mexico."

She also experienced how the people of the tight-knit community Pueblo Nuevo took care of one another, especially regarding public health matters. She watched her father and his coworkers at the local copper smelter go on strike with the common goals of equitable wages and a healthier, safer working environment.

Fast forward a few decades to when Wilkinson-Lee was a pre-med junior at the University of Arizona, taking classes in the Department of Mexican American Studies with an emphasis on Latino health. The first public health class she took was taught by Antonio Estrada, a professor emeritus whose career has focused on Hispanic health.

"I just kind of fell in love with it – it was the first time that I was seeing those connections between what is often considered traditional STEM sciences and the public health aspect of prevention science," she said. "That kind of shifted my whole mindset toward public health."

Now, as an associate professor of Mexican American studies in the U of A College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Wilkinson-Lee has focused her career on serving the public health needs of communities like Pueblo Nuevo. 

"I oftentimes want to make sure that we're recognizing the cultural assets of the Mexican community and not just the deficits," she said. "What we're trying to tap into is the cultural resilience, the networks, the social support and the cultural factors that really help drive resiliency of the community. I was able to experience that firsthand living on the border, seeing how people come together and help each other."

Resources for loneliness in border and rural areas

Wilkinson-Lee's latest project, which she helps lead as a co-principal investigator in the Arizona Prevention Research Center, sets out to address loneliness and social isolation among older residents in border communities and rural communities across Arizona. The project is called Together Across Generations (TAG): Implementing, Translating and Disseminating Evidence-Based Strategies to Reduce Social Isolation and Loneliness and Promote Intergenerational Connections Across Arizona.

The Arizona Prevention Research Center, known as AzPRC, is based in the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and has supported research projects to address health disparities in communities across Arizona for more than 25 years. 

The center's work relies mainly on funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is funding the TAG project on loneliness and social isolation with roughly $5 million over the next five years. The funding cycle for the project officially begins next month. 

The project follows a 2023 report by the U.S. surgeon general that shows loneliness may be a better predictor for death than smoking, alcohol consumption and obesity.

"Dr. Ada Wilkinson-Lee has been a terrific leader of the most recent and new core research projects of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded Arizona Prevention Research Center," said TAG project co-investigator Scott Carvajal, a professor in the Zuckerman College of Public Health and co-director of the AzPRC with Maia Ingram.

The TAG project will involve partnering with agencies and community members in three rural Arizona counties –Yuma, Santa Cruz and Cochise – as well as the Hualapai Tribe, whose homelands are in northwestern Arizona. 

Many of these counties, as well as the Hualapai Tribe, have existing programs designed to address loneliness and social isolation. Those include intergenerational programs that help local youth teach technology skills to older adults so they can stay connected virtually to friends and family. In return, elders provide lessons about cultural and traditional knowledge.

Wilkinson-Lee and her colleagues, through their new project, hope to extend the reach of such programs. 

"We're just coming in to provide financial resources and to collect data on the folks that are already integrated and using these interventions," Wilkinson-Lee said. "We're really a technical resource to them."

She and her colleagues will also help develop, conduct and evaluate a statewide plan to raise social isolation and loneliness awareness and surveillance, and encourage the adoption of intergenerational programs to reduce social isolation and loneliness with a focus on rural, border and tribal communities. 

Driven by community

Wilkinson-Lee and her colleagues in AzPRC specialize in community-based participatory research, which involves working closely with members of a community to develop plans to address that community's public health issues. 

This type of work is central to Wilkinson-Lee's research, she said. Every project at the center is done in collaboration with community health workers and community partners, locals who serve as "the conduit between the patient and the health care provider" and are commonly known by their Spanish name, promotoras, Wilkinson-Lee said.

"We see promotoras as the bedrock of all of the projects that we work on," Wilkinson-Lee said, adding that many of them are volunteers or work for low wages simply because they want to help their communities. 

About 10 community health workers will sit on a community action board that will guide the TAG project on loneliness and isolation. The board will advise the AzPRC partners on each community's needs as the project moves forward over the next five years.

Work like this is crucial, Wilkinson-Lee said, especially for a land-grant institution like the U of A.

"If we do research for the sake of research, then we're missing the mark and we're not applying the findings to the communities that are being impacted," she said. "Let's go to the source. We should be tapping into the expertise that's in these communities."