Melvin Jackson has over 35 years of experience in community engagement, public health research and program coordination. Beyond his work on Clinical Scholars, he is the Public Health Advocacy Coordinator/Local Improvement Advisor with the Alexander YMCA SCALE (Spreading Community Accelerators through Learning and Evaluation) Program. In this role, he leads the Southeast Raleigh (SER) Pacesetters Collaborative. The Collaborative is a part of the transformative redevelopment initiative called the Southeast Raleigh Promise, a community that will become a vibrant and vital link to elementary education, affordable housing, health and wellness, economic opportunity and leadership development in Southeast Raleigh. He served as Program Director at Strengthening The Black Family (STBF), Inc., a community-based organization with a 33-year history of serving the targeting Southeast Raleigh. Melvin has served as a community partner on many research projects in collaboration with the UNC-CH. More recently, he has served as Co-PI on a CBPR study piloting an HIV prevention intervention for African American youth in faith-based settings and, PI on a similar project implementing an evidence-based intervention in public housing communities and youth-serving organizations in Southeast Raleigh.