Elaine Jean Struthers
NNMC News:
ESPAÑOLA — Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) announces Elaine Jean Struthers, Ph.D., OTR/L, as its new Coordinator for Community Engagement and Partnerships.
Struthers will be directing Northern’s community engagement efforts for both the Española and El Rito campuses.
“I’m excited to be out in the community and to meet people, and really live the experience of what is meaningful and valuable to people in the Española Valley and surrounding areas,” Struthers said. “I really want to get to know the people and understand the region.”
After growing up in Southern Colorado, Struthers spent decades in Las Cruces, N.M., where she raised her daughter and watched her grandchildren grow up.
“So, my inner core is really being a part of the region,” Struthers said.
“Because I grew up in Southern Colorado and lived in Southern New Mexico and I had family both places, I feel like I spent my entire life driving up and down the Rio Grande. It’s like it had this heart that was pulsing in Colorado, where I came from, and then the life blood of the heart was pouring through New Mexico. I’ve spent my whole life studying it, thinking about it, reading about it, looking at it, getting out and experiencing it, showing my children and grandchildren that this is where you came from. So, this area is familiar, but it’s unfamiliar for me.”
Struthers will be responsible for identifying, building and maintaining relationships with the Northern community and other external stakeholders. She will be facilitating community input, assessing community needs and looking for opportunities to implement collaborative community-based programs and partnerships. Her duties will include project management of the El Rito Strategic Plan implementation and coordinating NNMC housing at El Rito. She will work with the leadership of the five school districts that comprise the NNMC Branch Community College district for joint initiatives, including dual credit.
Struthers began as a Southwest anthropologist, specializing in the ethnohistory of New Mexico, Colorado and New Spain, studying the area she had family ties to. She believes the tools she uses as an anthropologist, such as community-based participatory research, will be especially useful in this position.
“Anthropologists spend a lot of time looking at and observing communities and what people are doing and the occupations of people,” Struthers said.
According to Struthers, occupational therapists use many of the same qualitative tools, applied instead to looking at what is valuable and meaningful to individuals and using those observations to develop activities with meaning and purpose to help heal, rehabilitate and motivate people.
“I think the tools of occupational therapy and anthropology are great for community development. In fact, a lot of occupational therapists were community developers first,” Struthers said.
Struthers holds both a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Anthropology with a Minor in Southwest History from New Mexico State University. She has a long list of credentials as an occupational therapist, instructor of anthropology and researcher with numerous publications.
She once served as Director of the Occupational Therapy Graduate Program at Western New Mexico University, Silver City. Struthers was a Fulbright Core Grant Recipient to Bulgaria and is an honorary member of the Bulgarian Occupational Therapy Association (ABET). She makes regular visits to Bulgaria, where she participates in community development projects and community based participatory research related to accessibility.
