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Empowerment Praxis: Community Organizing to Redress Systemic Health Disparities
Author(s) -
Douglas Jason A.,
Grills Cheryl T.,
Villanueva Sandra,
Subica Andrew M.
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
american journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.113
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1573-2770
pISSN - 0091-0562
DOI - 10.1002/ajcp.12101
Subject(s) - community organizing , community psychology , redress , public health , community health , social determinants of health , health equity , public relations , sociology , community based participatory research , empowerment , community organization , health psychology , participatory action research , political science , psychology , medicine , social psychology , nursing , anthropology , law
Social and environmental determinants of childhood obesity present a public health dilemma, particularly in low‐income communities of color. Case studies of two community‐based organizations participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE) childhood obesity initiative demonstrate multilevel, culturally situated community organizing strategies to address the root causes of this public health disparity. Informed by a 3‐lens prescription—Social Justice, Culture‐Place, and Organizational Capacity—contained in the CCHE Change Model and Evaluation Frame, we present examples of individual, organizational, and community empowerment to redress systemic inequities that manifest in poor health outcomes for people of color. These case studies offer compelling evidence that public health disparities in these communities may effectively be abated through strategies that employ bottom‐up, community‐level approaches for (a) identifying proximal and distal determinants of public health disparities, and (b) empowering communities to directly redress these inequities. Guided by this ecological framework, application of the CCHE evaluation approach demonstrated the necessity to document the granularity of community organizing for community health, adding to the community psychology literature on empowering processes and outcomes.