CONNECTNeighbor to neighbor: Empower Boyle Heights residents to help each other access wellness resources.
Improve health outcomes and social connectedness in Boyle Heights by empowering residents to conduct community outreach and education, so that their fellow neighbors can access wellness resources.
Please describe the activation your organization seeks to launch.
We seek to train and empower 25 Boyle Heights residents to become promotores to improve physical and emotional health outcomes in the community. Once trained, the promotores will conduct community outreach and education to help their fellow neighbors access much-needed health and wellness resources, reaching 4,500+ residents. By being truly resident-led, the promotora model will not only improve health outcomes, but also increase community empowerment and social connectedness.
Which of the CONNECT metrics will your activation impact?
Adults getting sufficient social & emotional support
Will your proposal impact any other LA2050 goal categories?
LA is the best place to LEARN
LA is the healthiest place to LIVE
In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?
East LA
How will your activation mobilize Angelenos?
Advocate for policy
Trainings and/or in-person engagements
Increase participation in political processes
Influence individual behavior
Connect Angelenos with impactful volunteer opportunities
Describe in greater detail how your activation will make LA the best place to CONNECT?
We will make LA a better place to CONNECT by ensuring that the community of Boyle Heights gets sufficient social and emotional support. We will do this by improving the health and social connectedness of families by training and supporting 25 promotores from within the community to reach out to over 4,500 residents over two years to:
o Increase families’ awareness of health and wellness resources, and
o Help families connect to and navigate health and wellness services.
Below are details of the activities to achieve this goal:
1. Promotores Training — increase participation in community problem-solving by training promotores in the community. Trainings will include:
o Foundation-building training sessions — for the promotores to developing skills in areas such as listening, connecting with others, and public speaking. We will conduct four sessions up to three hours each.
o Content-specific training — in areas such as understanding and navigating wellness resources, trauma needs/issues, community wellness needs, and impact and coping tools for community and individual stress.
2. Promotores Support — ensure continual participation in community problem-solving by offering ongoing support to promotores. Promesa Boyle Heights will offer in-person engagements to support and coordinate promotores as they begin their work in the community through:
o Monthly promotores meetings
o Building a strong peer-to-peer support system, including “Lead Promotores”.
3. Promotores community-level work once trained will include:
o Influencing individual behavior in the community around health and social connectedness through:
* Resident outreach
* Wellness referrals
o Conducting in-person engagements with community members through presentations and workshops
o Increasing participation of the residents in community problem-solving by offering residents volunteer opportunities to get involved in community organizing efforts to advocate for policy e.g. connecting them to the Comite de Lideres and other organizing and system-level efforts.
The improved health outcomes and increased social connectedness will ultimately contribute to enhanced educational and life outcomes for the families served.
How will your activation engage Angelenos to make LA the best place to CONNECT
The activation will engage the community of Boyle Heights, which is in the top 10% of LA County’s 272 communities with high income and educational risk factors. The community is at high risk of not receiving sufficient social and emotional support as shown by two factors:
o Race: 94% of Boyle Heights residents are Latino — the least likely race to receive sufficient social and emotional support, when compared with White, African-American or Asian.
o Education: 54% of Boyle Heights residents over the age of 25 do not have a high school diploma — the least likely to receive sufficient social and emotional support when compared to those with a high school, college or post-graduate degree.
In addition, 1 in 3 families live below the federal poverty line, and more than half of residents are foreign-born, and for the majority, Spanish is their primary language.
Promesa’s core approach underlying all our strategies for change is to foster local leadership and civic engagement so that residents become agents of change in their own lives and community. The promotora model will involve extensive training and support for 25 residents to become agents of change in their community. Once we have developed their leadership and capacity, the promotores will reach out to over 4,500 fellow residents to help them access health and wellness resources. The residents themselves will lead the transformation process to reach the LA2050 goal of 95% of adults receiving social and emotional support
Please explain how you will define and measure success for your activation.
The success of the promotores (1) training, and (2) support will be defined by the growth of the promotores themselves. This will be measured by their:
o Leadership development
o Confidence
o Connection to each other
o Employability.
The success of the promotores (3) community-level work will be defined by the increase in families’ awareness of health and wellness resources, and families’ increased connectedness to those resources. This will be measured by the following indicators:
* Number of resident contacts made by promotores
* Number of referrals made by promotores and percentage of referrals completed
* Number of residents who receive a referral and percentage who follow through on the referral and connect to health services
* Number of presentations and workshops given by promotores and number of residents attending
* Percentage of presentation/workshop participants reporting increased knowledge.
Where do you hope this activation or your organization will be in five years?
Within Boyle Heights, we plan to scale up the number of promotores year-on-year in order to expand reach to residents over time. Moreover, we see our model being replicated by other low-income communities within Los Angeles that, though each facing their own unique issues, share a common need to raise the voices of local residents.We are building a model in which we catalyze “everyday” peoples’ passions, lived-experiences, and creativity to support comprehensive solutions that build on one another’s assets. Promesa Boyle Heights’ mission and reason for being is not simply to transform Boyle Heights. Rather, it is to “scale up” our successes so that by 2050, Los Angeles is a city in which ALL residents are empowered to work with schools, elected officials, and business leaders in order to collectively shape the future of the city.