Trustee Kurt C. Organista Receives $2 Million Grant to Investigate HIV-Prevention Model for Migrant Laborers

San Francisco Foundation Trustee Professor Kurt C. Organista, Ph.D., associate dean at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, has received a prestigious and competitive research-collaborative grant totaling more than $2 million from the National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

The award will support Professor Organista’s long-standing project to push prevention science forward by developing and testing a structural-environmental model of HIV risk and prevention for migrant day laborers in San Francisco and Berkeley. The conceptual model takes special consideration of the environmental factors influencing individual behavior, such as harsh living and working conditions as well as intense social stigmatization of undocumented Latinos in the U.S.

He is working in partnership with several Bay Area human-service institutions assisting migrant populations, including the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center, the Multicultural Institute of West Berkeley, the Research Triangle Institute, La Raza Centro Legal, San Francisco State University and the University of California, San Francisco.

Professor Organista’s research at the School of Social Welfare includes HIV prevention and the relationship between alcohol consumption and the health and social consequences of drinking patterns among migrant laborers in the United States. His study on the topic has been published in several journals, including the American Journal of Community Psychology, Community Health, the Hispanic Journal of the Behavioral Sciences, Journal of AIDS, and Health and Social Work.

He joined the Foundation’s Board of Trustees in 2009, and has served on the Foundation’s Koshland Committee since 2006. Learn more about Professor Organista on our Board of Trustees page.