UNC Chapel Hill
Howard W Odum Institute for Research in Social Science

The Odum Institute: CSSP’s First Home

The Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was founded by Howard Odum in 1924. It is the oldest center or institute at the oldest public university in the nation. It has evolved over the years, adapting to the changing needs of social science researchers and graduate students.

The Odum Institute was chosen as the administrative home of the Citizen Soldier Support Program because it was an independent administrative entity and not affiliated with any one department or school. It also had a history of spinning off centers or institutes, such as the Center for Urban and Regional Studies, after several years of nurturing and growth.

After two years of operation, CSSP’s founding director and principal investigator, Dennis Orthner, PhD, stepped down and the Odum Institute’s deputy director, Peter Leousis, assumed the role of principal investigator. It was under his leadership that CSSP narrowed its focus to training for health care providers about mental health issues facing veterans returning from deployment in the Middle East.

The Odum Institute assembled the team that created the CSSP that exists today (Bob Goodale, Bill Abb, Susan Kerner-Hogue and many others). In choosing to focus on in-person and online training for health care providers, the team used six criteria for evaluating interventions:

  1. The intervention must be systemic. Can it target “systems” of care that support National Guard and Reserve veterans and their families.
  2. The intervention must be effective in addressing the challenges facing returning service members and their families. In other words, does it work?
  3. The intervention must be replicable. Is it possible to reproduce the success of a single intervention?
  4. The intervention must be scalable. Can the intervention be replicated on a large scale such as a single state, region of the country, or the nation itself?
  5. The intervention must be cost-effective. Does the potential good realized by the intervention outweigh the cost of supporting the intervention?
  6. The intervention must be sustainable when direct funding for project activities ends. Will it be possible to continue the intervention after federal funding disappears?