Nuestro Futuro Saludable: The Jamaica Plain Partnership for Healthy Caribbean Latino Youth
The Tisch College Community Research Center provided initial funding for this project which aimed to develop, pilot, evaluate, and disseminate a health intervention targeted at Caribbean Latino youth in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
The research had two primary components: to establish a community advisory board to guide the development, implementation, and dissemination of an intervention that is culturally appropriate and community-specific; and to design and pilot test a community-level, disease-specific intervention to mitigate the direct and/or indirect effects of the built environment on health. As a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project, the study was conducted in conjunction with local leaders and organizations. This model developed capacity through both knowledge acquisition and the expansion of personal social networks. Community members gained knowledge specific to research partnerships for health, conducting community needs assessments, intervention research planning and design, the social determinants of health, analyzing and interpreting data. Simultaneously, investigators gained knowledge related to the dynamics of community and community infrastructure, how the local youth community experienced health disparities and the factors that create and sustain them, as well as how to negotiate diverse community perspectives and approaches for creating sustainable interventions that reflect community needs.
Participants
- Linda Sprague Martínez
- Flavia Perea
- Uchenna Ndulue
- Elmer Freeman, Center for Community Health Education Research and Service
- Abigail Ortiz, Southern Jamaica Plain Community Health Center
- Dora Gutiérrez, Latin American Health Institute
- Meghan Patterson, Boston Public Health Commission's Center for Health Equity and Social Justice