This Giving Tuesday, Give Teens the Power to Choose

Ty’Keese wants to be a mom someday. Just not right now.

Robert used to think that pregnancy was not really his problem.

Both Ty’Keese and Robert have participated in National Health Foundation’s Be A Star programs that offer at-risk youth in South Los Angeles high schools the type of frank and open conversations about pregnancy, sexual health, goal setting and personal responsibility that have proven to reduce teen pregnancy. After all, Be A Star’s motto is Be A ‘Successful Teen Acting Responsibly’!

Ty’Keese is currently attending Humboldt State University working towards her degree in psychology and Robert is in his last year of high school and serves as a mentor to other young men in the program.

The harsh reality is only 40% of teen moms finish high school and fewer than 2% finish college by age 30*. High school dropouts face unemployment, poverty – and shorter lives. Yes, you read that correctly. There is a significant link between education and health. High school graduates live longer than high school dropouts. College graduates have even longer life spans, better access to health care, better dietary and health practices, and overall better health.

Be A Star has provided more than 700 students with the tools they needed to prevent unwanted pregnancy and set a clear path to graduation and beyond. For teens who are already parenting, the program encourages students to complete high school, set goals for college and prevent any additional unwanted pregnancies.

“It is amazing to watch the young men and women in the program really step into themselves. They come in somewhat shy and unsure and by the time they complete the program they are knowledgeable and empowered. You can see it in the way they speak. More importantly though, you can sense the hope they have for their futures,” shared Be A Star program manager, Jeanette Pena.

All of the donations received by National Health Foundation on #GivingTuesday will be used to expand and improve our health programs such as Be A STAR. We’re hoping to raise $8000 to increase the number of participants we can serve. Click here to connect with our donation page.

Find out more about the Be A Star Boys from Raymond Diaz, program coordinator: Click here

*The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, “Preventing Teen Pregnancy is Critical to School Completion,” Briefly… (Washington, D.C.) July 2010

A Community Comes Together for a Healthier Future

In 2015, National Health Foundation (NHF), CaliforniaHospital Medical Center (CHMC), and the Los Angeles County Department of PublicHealth (LACDPH) were awarded a BUILD Health Challenge planning grant to launch the BUILD Health LA initiative. The novel partnership had a specific goal: address the complex issues of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Turning our attention to Historic South Central Los Angeles, the partnership sought to identify upstream solutions that address health disparities and inequities in the neighborhood by addressing the root causes of these issues. A team of nine emerging youth leaders from three South LA high schools was selected as community liaisons and led the comprehensive data collection efforts that informed the solutions identified by a community action plan.

Following 23 key informant interviews, 51 references and 515 community surveys, the Youth-Driven Healthy South LA (BUILD Health LA) team identified a lack of access to healthy food, a lack of access to open space for physical activity, and safety concerns as the barriers to a healthy lifestyle for their community. The community liaisons, together with community partners, are now moving to implement innovative and upstream solutions that tackle these issues.

In a densely populated community unhealthy ‘junk’ food is available at an alarmingly disproportionate rate, prompting some to label South LA as a “food swamp.” A strategy to provide 16 corner store owners the opportunity to enroll in the Leadership for Urban Renewal Network’s (LURN) CommunityMarkets Purchasing Real and Affordable (COMPRA) Foods Program will infuse more healthy food options into the neighborhood. The purchasing program will allow market owners the opportunity to purchase fresh produce at a low-cost and thereby increase access to fresh fruit and produce for the community. The youth community health liaisons will identify the 16 markets and, with the support of the LACDPH, will help the markets to promote healthy food messaging at the stores.

With only .4 acres of park space per 100,000 residents, South Los Angeles stands in stark contrast with the recommended 3 acres per 1,000 people. Furthermore, residents report that the 10 parks and 4 pocket parks that do exist are often not maintained and are centers of crime making them unsafe for residents. The youth community health liaisons will take the lead in developing and advocating for park safety. With a keen eye on pedestrian and bicycle accessibility, the youth will conduct assessments to determine what types of infrastructure are needed to ensure all parks are safe and inviting to the community. The youth will then present their recommendations to local stakeholders to advocate for action.

The environmental scan further discovered that recreational facilities offer a limited number of affordable physical activity programs, and that the programs that are offered often have long waiting lists. Providing residents opportunities to engage in physical activity is crucial especially given the high numbers of obesity, diabetes and other disease related to sedentary lifestyles and inactivity. The project team will expand the capacity of a few local community-based organizations to offer additional physical activity programs for community members, specifically in park-poor areas of the neighborhood and areas with limited fitness programming, by connecting these organizations to California State University Northridge’s3WINS Fitness Program. These trained kinesiology students will teach free fitness classes that will be held outside in local parks near the host organizations. A Place Called Home and All People’s Community Center will outreach to residents to participate in these new programs.

With the plan in place, the youth and the community partners share a common goal: getting the word out about the healthy changes in the neighborhood. Currently, the community is saturated with unhealthy food messages on billboards, buses and street corners but the youth and the project partners have identified more than 70 service organizations that have regular contact with residents and could help maximize the awareness of and participation in this program. The youth will develop a comprehensive marketing campaign and, together with the project partners, will raise awareness of the health-related improvements in their community. The sustainability of policy, systems and the health of their neighbors are depending on their ability to connect residents to the fresh produce, safe parks and opportunities for fun physical activity sprouting up in their community.

Teens Bring Mini-Farm Stands to the Classroom, Reduce Food Waste in the Process

Youth engagement provides young people with the opportunity to develop leadership skills and address challenges they face head-on in their own communities. For the past three years, National Health Foundation’s Health Academy has been working alongside youth from Historic South Central Los Angeles to address upstream barriers to healthy weight such as access to healthy food in their community. NHF Health Academy’s “Legion of Health” youth team is one of four teams in the program that engaged in youth participatory action research to identify issues impacting access to healthy food and food waste and develop and implement solutions to tackle those barriers. Here is one example of their success.

In the fall of 2014, Los Angeles Unified School District implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), a program that enables students to eat breakfast provided by the school in their classrooms rather than before they get to school. This was especially important at Thomas Jefferson High School where the surrounding community is labeled a food desert¹ and access to healthy foods is an extreme challenge. Living in a “food desert” means that at least one third of the residents live more than one mile from a grocery store and in a dense urban environment, that is a significant barrier. In addition, those grocery stores serve significantly more people than in areas with better access. A 2010 Community Health Councils report indicated that South Los Angeles’s 60 full-service grocery stores serve approximately 22,156 residents each. In comparison, West LA’s 57 grocery stores each serve approximately half the number of residents. Layer onto this story the fact that 60% of South Los Angeles eateries are fast food restaurants. Clearly, BIC was an essential program providing increased access to fresh, healthy foods and students needed to take greater advantage of this opportunity. Within these statistics, the Legion of Health youth team saw an opportunity to make real impact.

As the Legion of Health team investigated the BIC program, they discovered that one of the unintended consequences was an increase in food waste, specifically the fruit accompanying the breakfast meal. A meeting and tour of the cafeteria with the Cafeteria Manager gave the youth real insight into the actual volume of food waste. The youth team began re-envisioning the BIC program as a way to encourage consumption by recovering the food and offering it as a snack to students throughout the day. This option would reducing food waste and minimize cost of healthy snacks. Legion of Health developed a pilot project to provide healthy snacks throughout the day at no cost to students by saving the surplus of fruit and/or non-perishable food items from the BIC program. Youth placed decorative baskets in classrooms and set uneaten food from BIC into the basket. Legion of Health named their project “Health Academy Mini-Farm Stand” and designed baskets to hold the fruit in classrooms. Legion of Health partnered with several of their high school teachers to implement the pilot project in select classrooms. Youth also developed a tracking system to record the number of students that grabbed a snack. Legion of Health hypothesized that students would consume all the items by the end of each school day.

The project findings proved the Legion of Health’s hypothesis to be correct: all food from the farm stand baskets were consumed by the end of each school day. Legion of Health presented these findings to school administration and advocated for school-wide implementation. School leaders agreed to implement the project school-wide so that every classroom would have a “Health Academy Mini-Farm Stand” basket and students would have access to healthy food anytime of the school day in any classroom on campus. Since school-wide implementation, the Cafeteria Manager is reporting a near complete reduction of food waste from BIC.

Legion of Health recently expanded the “Health Academy Mini-Farm Stand” project to Nava College Prep Academy. Legion of Health presented the benefits of the baskets to students and staff along with delivering baskets to each of the classrooms. This past school year, Legion of Health met with Laura Benavides Co-Director of LAUSD Food Services who applauded the youth’s efforts. In the coming year, Health Academy’s Legion of Health will seek out partnerships at other schools to expand the program in hopes of ultimately meeting with the LAUSD School Board to advocate for district-wide implementation.

^[1] ‘Free and Reduced Meal,’ Analysis, Measurement, & Accountability Reporting Division. California Department of Education, 2013; http://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/cpns/Documents/SNAP-Ed%20FFY%2015%20Att%201%20FRPM%202013%2005%2024.pdf

NHF Seeks KaBOOM! Funding to Further their BUILD Health Challenge Efforts

 

Playing is an essential part of development for young children. Its benefits go beyond learning to include better health and improved social skills. However, not every child lives in a community with enough accessible, safe, outdoor space to play.

The national nonprofit KaBOOM! is dedicated to bringing balanced and active play in the daily lives of all children. Their latest “play challenge” will award $1 million in prizes to communities that provide the best ideas to increase the playability of their neighborhood. For this challenge, there is one caveat, the idea to increase playability must be implemented in a nontraditional space, such as a sidewalk, vacant lot, bus stop, or street.

Like KaBOOM!, National Health Foundation (NHF) realizes that in some communities, a nontraditional approach is often necessary. Over the last year, NHF, in partnership with the California Medical Center and the Los Angeles Department of Public Health, has conducted an environmental scan of the Historic South Los Angeles community. Among a wide range of identified health disparities and poor social determinants of health this community faces, lack of safe, open play space is one of community residents’ greatest concerns. After carefully evaluating the needs of the community and receiving input from a team of South LA high school youth leaders, a robust community action plan was created to address this lack of safe, open space in Historic South LA, along with the lack of access to healthy food.

The community action plan will address the lack of safe, open space through a tested method, partnership with the 100 Citizens program, which places kinesiology students from local universities in local communities to facilitate exercise programs. There is demonstrated need for this partnership. Local organizations that offer physical activity programming have long waiting lists and too few resources to meet the demand. Implementation of these partnerships would take place in small pocket parks that currently have no programming. Through this action plan, NHF and its partners will support residents in taking advantage of their parks. 

In July, NHF’s KaBOOM! playability idea was selected as one of the top 200 ideas submitted to the Play Everywhere Challenge. In line with the strategies of the action plan, NHF proposed to, in collaboration with Council District 9 and five youth leaders from a local high school, design a maze that will highlight historic events of South Central on the sidewalk in frontof the Constituent Center located on Central Avenue. Additionally, creative seating will be installed that will be abstract in shape, such as concrete orbs, or cylinders. The project will provide an opportunity to play and learn in a space that is safe and close to community resources, the Council District’s Constituent Resource Center on Central Avenue.  Here there is high pedestrian traffic. As a main corridor of the community, high pedestrian traffic will bring many children through the maze to play. NHF’s KaBOOM! submission is building on the work already underway to enhance the local community’s physical environment and invite children and adults alike to get more physically active.