Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance Works with Community Leaders to Promote Healthy Homes

Introduction by Kathleen Fenton

Environmental Education is important work and the outputs and outcomes of our grantees can make a daily difference. As we continue to celebrate this year’s Environmental Education Week, April 20-24, I want to introduce you to one of our current Environmental Education (EE) grantees who explained how their initial application for funding became a meaningful project on the ground. The Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance received an EE grant in late 2013.

By Kara Henner Eastman

The Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance (OHKA) is proud to partner with the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health, several Omaha community-based organizations, and EPA to launch the Grassroots Latino Environmental Education (GLEE) program. For us, GLEE is about getting critically important information out to an underserved community.

Members of the Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance (left to right): President and CEO Kara Henner Eastman, Operations Manager Clayton Evans, Development Coordinator Shannon Melton, Office Manager Nickie Johnson, and Program Director Saul Lopez. (Not pictured: Director of Community Partnerships Nicole Caputo-Rennels, Field Supervisor Kathleen Vinton, and Intern Halie Smith.)

OHKA is a children’s environmental health organization working to promote green, safe, and healthy housing in Omaha. One of our primary areas of focus is environmental education for the entire community. In our experience, we have found that information about environmental hazards is not readily available in Spanish, or when it is, the information is difficult to access.

We created the GLEE program to disseminate information and education to many people in a way that is culturally appropriate and easily replicable. We found that the promotora, or community health worker model, was a very effective means of getting information out to the Latino population, but that promotoras in Omaha were giving information solely on health and not on the connection between housing and health. Thus, GLEE would be an innovative way to build a workforce of promotoras who are trained to deliver education out to their own friends and family members.

The first GLEE promotora training was provided Feb. 28, 2015. OHKA partnered with FRATER, a local church group that primarily serves the Latino community by offering in-home assistance with cleaning and restoration. All attendees were attentive and particularly excited to participate in the various hands-on activities created by the GLEE Program Director, Saul Lopez. One of those activities included using a lead swab test. The promotoras were shocked when the lead swab turned red as they rubbed it on a piece of Mexican pottery.

Reverend Rubén López Paiz (left) and members of his congregation, Iglesia de Dios Fraternidad Cristiana, learn several green cleaning recipes as part of the promotora training.

Two of the promotoras held their first home-based outreach event March 10, 2015. One of the attendees asked if he could use a boot to test for lead since he recently began work building bridges and was going to keep his boots in the living room, which is also where his young children play. Within a few minutes of testing the sole of his boot, a thin line turned red. Everyone inside the room was speechless as they discovered that a lead hazard was now present in this home. The promotoras began to educate the group about the importance of keeping work clothes and boots in plastic bags outside the house and away from children. Saul later told me that he realized the importance of this program on that day, and that if GLEE had not been created, this man might have poisoned his own children with a simple pair of work boots.

Over the next two years, OHKA will expand the GLEE program to educate 30 promotoras who will, in turn, educate over 900 Spanish-speaking individuals about environmental hazards in the home. The College of Public Health is working with OHKA to evaluate the program so we know what is working and how to make improvements along the way. Together, we are creating a program that will be proven to work and to change lives along the way.

Kara Henner Eastman is President and CEO of the Omaha Healthy Kids Alliance. She holds a master’s degree in social work from Loyola University of Chicago. Kara’s primary experiences have been with start-up nonprofit organizations focusing on social and health issues.

from Planet GS via John Jason Fallows on Inoreader http://ift.tt/1PqsV97
Casey McLaughlin