Three lenses prescription for reducing ethnic and racial health disparities through community organizing-based health promotion

Community organizing is a potentially viable intervention approach for addressing ethnic and racial health disparities in communities of color. The Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE) initiative was the first national project to address the childhood obesity epidemic by implementing diverse community organizing strategies (e.g., build and mobilize leader base, direct action/protest) across multiple vulnerable, low-income, communities of color. Based on an extensive program evaluation of the four-year CCHE initiative, an expert team of community organizers and academic partners developed three lenses (Social Justice, Culture/Place, Organizational Capacity/Organizing Approach) to: (1) promote alliances between health professionals and community-based organizations that produce effective, culturally responsive, health promotion programs for communities of color, and (2) contextualize the evaluation of these unique health promotion programs. The presentation will extensively discuss these three lenses and how they may be applied by public health professionals to inform the development of community organizing-based health promotion programs. We will present multiple case examples from the 21 CCHE grantees as evidence for how these lenses successfully bring together health professionals and community change agents to sustainably reduce racial and ethnic health disparities in communities of color by promoting community education, empowerment, and action.