Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project

July 2009 Update

Collective Roots is currently dedicated to implementing the Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project. This project entails the use of the Healthy Development Measurement Tool (HDMT) in order to assess community indicators that impact the health of East Palo Alto.  The HDMT is nationally recognized by the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) and has been successfully implemented in San Francisco by the Public Health Department.

Collecting concrete data from the HDMT will foster understanding of specific indicators that are affecting the health of East Palo Alto residents.  Subsequently, upon identifying the health needs of the community, the city of East Palo Alto will work towards tackling these problem areas by developing programs to alleviate these disparities.  At the completion of this project, the health data will be published and made readily accessible to all East Palo Alto residents.

With the support of Executive Director Wolfram Alderson, Collective Roots has devised a Team dedicated to getting the Immigrant Health Integration and Advocacy Project off the ground: a Public Health Project Manager (Mayra Betancourt), two full time Public Health Fellows (Rylan Rosario and Ginille Lazaro), thanks to support from Health Career Connection, and one full-time Youth Health Advocate (Aaminah Khan), who was hired thanks to a partnership with Job Train.

Currently, Collective Roots has been working closely to form relationships with several community organizations in East Palo Alto some of which include but are not limited to San Mateo Public Health Department, Ravenswood City School district, Sequoia High School District, East Palo Alto Charter School, Ravenswood Family Health Center, and the YMCA. The Team is collaborating with various organizations in the hopes of creating a network of data collection.

In addition, the Team has added the development of focus group discussions as a part of the community engagement component of the HDMT project. With this data we plan to gain valuable insight of the needs of the community as told by community members themselves. These focus group discussions will include individuals of various ages and each participant will be rewarded with a $5 Fresh Check from our EPA Community Farmer’s Market. In the discussions, participants will be asked various questions concerning the needs of the community and what they identify as the pressing issues in the community. The community discussions are currently being arranged with various community based organizations in EPA.

Also, the Team is working to develop a health provider’s survey. This survey will include various questions regarding the health of EPA residents. The Team has identified multiple clinics (Willow Clinic, Fair Oaks Clinic, Ravenswood Clinic) that commonly see EPA residents. Health care providers targeted include primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, health educators and physician’s assistants. This data will be valuable to our project because we will have data that will directly assess the primary causes of health needs as reported by the health professionals.

Some of the greatest challenges of this project have been gathering data from diverse sources and stakeholders. Several organizations have mentioned the limitations of the data that they could provide to the project; accuracy of data and the availability of sets of data have been key issues that have been encountered by the team. Another challenge that the team has faced is communicating with organizations and getting responses or follow up actions to occur; many nonprofits in East Palo Alto are currently struggling to meet the needs of community, find it challenging to take on new work or collaborations, or simply struggling to stay in business given the current economic and funding climate. The HDMT Team will continue to meet with collaborators and partners and pursue the highest level of engagement possible.