Join us on Wednesday, November 19th, as the AVA Webinar Series presents Empowering Student Trainees, Academics, and Community Agency Leaders to Address Gender-Based Violence and Adverse Childhood Experiences: Evaluating AVA’s Mentorship and Internship Programs, featuring Stefan Kurbatfinski from the University of Calgary.
Wednesday, November 19th, 2025
12 – 1:30pm MST
The Alliance against Violence and Adversity (AVA) unites students, academics, and community-based agencies to help bridge the knowledge-to-practice gap regarding two major public health concerns: gender-based violence (GBV) and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). To address GBV and ACEs, AVA has developed various programs to support collaboration and learning. Of the programs, two are closely link but still distinct, the: (1) Triadic Mentorship Program (TMP) and (2) Community Agency Internship Program (CAIP). The TMP is a flexible mentorship collaboration involving at least one graduate student (mentee), one academic mentor, and one community agency mentor, encouraging transdisciplinary discussions focused on GBV and ACEs. The TMP aims to equip mentees with greater comfort to engage in research or work around GBV and ACEs while helping mentors develop bridge the often-siloed nature of academic versus community-based work. On the other hand, the CAIP offers mentees the opportunity to engage in an internship with a community-based agency, allowing them to gain experience working outside of an academic setting and to foster greater capacity to work alongside, or in, community-based settings. In this webinar, I will provide an in-depth description about the TMP and CAIP and use pilot data and my own personal experiences to describe their development and impacts on initial cohorts along with next steps. Overall, the TMP and CAIP can be used as frameworks for programs addressing similar public health concerns.
About the Speaker
Stefan Kurbatfinski, BSc, is a 4th year Doctoral Student in the Department of Community Health Sciences Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is committed to conducting research that targets and identifies health disparities among families experiencing vulnerabilities, with emphasis among sexual and gender minority groups. Mr. Kurbatfinski has a planned post-doctoral position at the University of Toronto in which he hopes to further investigate longitudinal parent-child development among sexual and gender minority parents and their children.