Draft:Jamie Lachman

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Jamie M. Lachman is a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow at the Univerisity of Oxford Department of Social Policy and Intervention, an Associate Professor at the University of Cape Town Centre of Social Science Research, and the Chief Executive Officer of Parenting for Lifelong Health. He is also a social entrepreneur, singer-songwriter, mindfulness practitioner, workshop facilitator, and theatre clown.

Early life

Jamie Lachman was born in South Africa in 1975 and moved to the USA during early childhood. The third child of four, he grew up in Farminginton and West Hartford, Connecticut. During his youth, he studied classical piano and sang in choirs, including the Hall High School Choraliers and Jazz Singers. He was also influenced by the songs and singing of Pete Seeger who inspired Jamie to learn the banjo and become a singer-songwriter. When he was 16 years old, Jamie volunteered for The Homestead supporting street children in Cape Town and for CHIPAWO Children's Performing Arts Workshop in Zimbabwe. He also was an Earthwatch volunteer in Botswana on a study examining the vegetation utilisation of Okavango Delta elephants with Dr Raphael Ben Shahar.

Education and early activism in the arts

Jamie was atended Yale University from 1993 to 1998 where he received a BA (Distinction) in American Studies. While at Yale University, Jamie was inpsired to hitchike to visit Pete Seeger after reading Woody Guthrie's Bound for Glory (book) and learning about Bob Dylan hitchhiking to visit Guthrie at the same age. Pete Seeger taught him how to play the banjo, chop wood, and tap maple syrup while instilling a sense of moral commitment to human rights and social justice. At this time, Jamie also became interested in protest songs and was involved in a labour strike at Yale University where he played on the picket lines to striking clerical and service employees. He also co-founded an agitprop theatre company called Acting Locals, and performed original songs accompanied by his banjo at local music clubs in New Haven. He was also active in the environmental movement, a campaign to get Yale to divest funds from Indonesia due to investments in East Timor, and a student movement for financial aid reform. During this time, Jamie lived in a student housing that was called the Mansfield Commune which was a collective of artists and activists.

Years as a musician and actor

After graduating from Yale, Jamie lived on an island in Maine, Vinalhaven, from 1998 to 2000 where he ran an ice cream store and pizzeria in the summers and apprenticed as a carpenter in the winter. He then moved to Los Angeles working for Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski as a researcher on a biopic about the Marx Brothers, though it was never made. Jamie also performed in music clubs throughout Los Angeles using the stage name, "Banjo Max." He then attended the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Northern California, learning corporeal mime, commedia dell'arte, and modern clowning. Upon graduation, Jamie moved with classmates to New York City (on the day before 9/11) where he worked as an actor with various ensemble theatre companies and as an theatre teacher at Friends Seminary.

Clowns Without Borders

In 2003, Jamie met Moshe Cohen, the founder of Clowns Without Borders USA (Payasos Sin Fronteras who inspired him to start volunteering with the organisation. His first trip took him back to South Africa, performing 29 shows over 21 days with a troupe of 3 other clowns from the USA and Ireland. He subsequently organised additional tours in South Africa, Eswatini, and Lesotho in 2005 and 2006, each of greater length with the aim to bring laughter and emotional relief to children affected by HIV/AIDS and poverty in rural and urban communities. He supported these tours by raising funds and awareness in the USA mainly through school and community performances in schools. In 2007, Jamie decided to move back to South Africa, settling in Durban where he founded the South African chapter of Clowns Without Borders. He also worked with the Swedish circus company, Cirkus Cirkor, using circus arts to provide psychosocial support and stability to street-connected children and youth.

Over the following years, Clowns Without Borders South Africa grew from a small nonprofit organisation into a medium-sized arts-based humanitarian organisation providing momentary relief to communities affected by crisis through circus and clown-based theatre. As executive director and master clown, Jamie performed and directed more than 1,100 shows to over 480,000 children throughout South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Haiti, and Lebanon. Jamie also co-developed arts-based workshops to provide psychosocial support to orphans and vulnerable children and their caregivers. These included the Injabulo HIV/AID Family Support Programme which combined play, storytelling, theatre, and mindfulness to help establish support groups for children affected by HIV/AIDS and their caregivers.

Back to academia

In 2010, Clowns Without Borders South Africa was asked by UNICEF to develop a plan to take to scale the Injabulo programme in Eswatini. Although initial responses from participants were overwhelmingly positive about the impacts of the programme, Jamie did not feel confident in replicating the programme without more robust evidence of effectiveness. This prompted him to return to academia, enrolling in an MSc course (Distinction) in Evidence-Based Social Intervention at the University of Oxford Department of Social Policy and Intervention and then a DPhil in Social Intervention as a Clarendon Scholar. His dissertation focused on the development and pilot randomised controlled trial of a parenting programme for isiXhosa parents of children ages 3 to 8 years living in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. The programme, called the Sinovuyo Caring Families Programme, integrated core evidence-based components from programmes tested in high-income countries with local Xhosa cultural practices, attitudes, and beliefs using a participatory, non-didactic, participatory approach. Building on his experience as a clown and storyteller, the programme also included activities to support playful interaction between parents and children. While doing his DPhil, Jamie also supported the development of a similar programme for parents/caregivers and adolescents aged 10 to 17 years which was tested in a cluster randomised controlled trial in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. These two programmes became the original core programmes for Parenting for Lifelong Health, an initiative Jamie co-founded with colleagues at UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the Universities of Bangor, Cape Town, Oxford, and Stellenbosch.

Career at Oxford

Upon finishing his doctorate in 2016, Jamie began a postdoc as a Research Officer within the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at University of Oxford. He was a co-principal investigator of a study in Tanzania examining the differential effects of parenting support, agribusiness training, and combined support on reducing violence against children. He also worked with colleagues at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines to adapt, pilot, and test the Parenting for Lifelong Health for Young Children programme. In 2017, Jamie worked part-time at Oxford as part-time at the University of Glasgow as a research Fellow in the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. He then returned to full-time at Oxford in 2021 as a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow, again in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention.

At Oxford, he is the lead principal investigator of the Global Parenting Initiative, a five year, $22million project that aims to improve the quality and impact of playful parenting interventions in low- and middle-income countries and also leads several research projects in different countries across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Additionally, he is the CEO and co-founder of Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH), a social enterprise that collaborates with World Health Organisation and UNICEF to support the implementation of parenting programmes in the Global South. He co-led an international team that developed and disseminated free and evidence-based parenting resources to help millions of people in almost 200 countries and territories cope with the challenges of COVID-19 on child wellbeing and violence prevention.

Publications

A full list of Lachman's academic publications can be found here but those of note include:

"Before I was like Tarzan, but now I take a pause"

"Parenting interventions promoting child protection and development for pre-school age children"

"Climate change is a threat multiplier for violence against children"

"How are parental mental health and parenting practices associated with externalizing behaviours among young children with autism in China?"

"Integrating intimate partner violence prevention content into a digital parenting chatbot intervention during COVID-19"

Awards

During the course of his career, Lachman has won many awards. Those of note are as follows:-

2022 - The NOAM Chomsky Global Connections - winner of the Humanitarian award

2022 - Oxford University Vice Chancellor's Award for Innovation and Engagement

2021 - United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council Celebrating Impact Winner, Panel’s Choice

2021 - O2RB Excellence in Impact Award for Scale-up of evidence-based parenting programmes for more than 193 million people during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry Best Paper Award from the Association of Child and Adolescent Mental Health