title: Communities of Color Creating Healthy Environments to Combat Childhood Obesity.
abstract: Ethnic and racial health disparities present an enduring challenge to community-based health promotion, which rarely targets their underlying population-level determinants (e.g., poverty, food insecurity, health care inequity). We present a novel 3-lens prescription for using community organizing to treat these determinants in communities of color based on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Communities Creating Healthy Environments initiative, the first national project to combat childhood obesity in communities of color using community organizing strategies. The lenses--Social Justice, Culture-Place, and Organizational Capacity-Organizing Approach--assist health professional-community partnerships in planning and evaluating community organizing-based health promotion programs. These programs activate community stakeholders to alter their community's disease-causing, population-level determinants through grassroots policy advocacy, potentially reducing health disparities affecting communities of color.
authors.affiliation: Andrew M. Subica is with the Center for Healthy Communities, School of Medicine, University of California, Riverside. Cheryl T. Grills, Jason A. Douglas, and Sandra Villanueva are with the Psychology Applied Research Center, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
authors.forename: Andrew M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Subica
authors.affiliation: Andrew M. Subica is with the Center for Healthy Communities, School of Medicine, University of California, Riverside. Cheryl T. Grills, Jason A. Douglas, and Sandra Villanueva are with the Psychology Applied Research Center, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
authors.forename: Cheryl T
authors.initials: CT
authors.lastname: Grills
authors.affiliation: Andrew M. Subica is with the Center for Healthy Communities, School of Medicine, University of California, Riverside. Cheryl T. Grills, Jason A. Douglas, and Sandra Villanueva are with the Psychology Applied Research Center, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
authors.forename: Jason A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Douglas
authors.affiliation: Andrew M. Subica is with the Center for Healthy Communities, School of Medicine, University of California, Riverside. Cheryl T. Grills, Jason A. Douglas, and Sandra Villanueva are with the Psychology Applied Research Center, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
authors.forename: Sandra
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Villanueva
mesh_terms: D057191:Capacity Building / Q000379:methods / Q000458:organization & administration; D019058:Community Networks / Q000458:organization & administration*; D003256:Community Participation; D004777:Environment; D005523:Food Supply; D054624:Health Status Disparities; D006801:Humans; D054525:Minority Health; D063766:Pediatric Obesity / Q000191:economics / Q000208:ethnology / Q000517:prevention & control*; D011203:Poverty; D012111:Residence Characteristics; D012449:Safety; D064890:Social Determinants of Health / Q000191:economics* / Q000208:ethnology; D012935:Social Justice / Q000592:standards*