Environmental Health Coalition

With funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, NCHH has funded two rounds of Healthy Homes Workforce Development Mini-Grants, with applications open during late 2017 and spring 2018. These mini-grants help communities develop their workforce capacity to offer home-visiting services related to healthy homes, and to build a pool of trained community health workers (CHWs) trained in the healthy homes principles.
The Environmental Health Coalition (EHC) works to reduce pollution and improve health and well-being for thousands of people in underserved, low-income communities in San Diego and Tijuana. EHC’s Healthy Kids/Healthy Homes program protects low-income children of color from hazards in the home including lead-based paint, mold, and pests. EHC works closely with CHWs across targeted neighborhoods and has recognized that there is a significant gap in CHWs from immigrant/refugee populations.
The focus area for the project is the community of City Heights in the City of San Diego. City Heights, known for its diversity, is a dense urban community of 95,000 living in approximately 6.5 square miles within San Diego. The community faces significant challenges including poverty. Although San Diego County does have a supportive CHW network, there is a significant gap in CHWs from immigrant/refugee communities. Almost half of the City Heights population is foreign born and more than 30 languages and 80 dialects are spoken in neighborhood classrooms. Languages in the community include Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Khmer, Tagalog, Burmese, Hmong, Lao, Karen, and Somali. Approximately one-third of City Heights residents are not fluent in English. For those that are non-English monolingual, accessing health information and services can be difficult, especially when local CHWs do not speak their language.
As a current 2018 mini-grantee, EHC will translate its healthy homes curriculum into three languages in addition to English and Spanish (i.e., Vietnamese, Karen, Somali) and provide healthy homes assessment training and materials to CHWs from the diverse immigrant community of City Heights. Together with local partners, EHC will host a unique Healthy Homes capacitation session with simultaneous interpretation into 4 languages (Vietnamese, Karen, Somali, Spanish). Healthy Homes assessment worksheets and informational handouts will be translated into the identified languages and shared with attendees and other nonprofit groups in the area for usage in their health outreach. The project will fill a critical gap in the healthy homes network by reaching children and families that have been unreachable due to language barriers.