Transcript
Title:Engaging Communities for Change: Stories from California
Date: November 3, 2016
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) captioning is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
This transcript is being provided in rough-draft format.
> LAURA BURR: Welcome to today's dialogue for health web forum. Engaging communities for change: Stories from California brought to you in collaboration from CA for health and dialogue 4 health. We thank the California endowment for funding today's event. My name is LauraBurr, and I will be hosting along with my colleague, Christina Lane.
Realtime captioning is provided today by Stacey of Home Team Captions. Click the media viewer icon on the top right of your screen. If you're on a Mac, you will see it on the bottom right. Next, locate the link in the captioning panel that says show/hide header. If you click these links, you'll be able to see the captioning more easily. And if the captioning window ever disappears, click the media viewer icon to bring it back again.
Today's web forum is listenonly. That means that you can hear us, but we can't hear you. That doesn't mean, though, that it won't be interruptive. Please share your thoughts and questions by typing them in the Q&A box. If r the Q&A panel can be toggled on and off by clicking. If you're on a Mac, you'll see it on the bottom right of your screen. In the Q&A panel, collect all panelists in the dropdown menu so that your question gets sent to the right place. You can also use the Q&A box to communicate with me if you're having any audio issues.
And we'll conduct polls today to get your feedback during the event. When you see a poll, please select your answer, and be sure to click the submit button. We're getting started with a poll right now. You may be interested in seeing how others are attending this event. And we'll bring up that, and you can let us know if you're in a group or if you're attending alone. And I can see lots of responses coming now. Be sure to click submit. And Christina, you can go ahead and close that poll. And click apply, and we'll see the results, but it takes a few moments for those results to come up. And it looks like 94% are attending alone. And about 4% are in a group of two to five people. So thank you for taking that first poll.
And now I'd like to introduce you to today's moderator. It's my pleasure to introduce sue Watson. Sue is the program director for the CA4 Health community of practice. Previously she was the manager for public health institute's community transformation grant where she provided oversight for all strategic directions. Susan has over 17 years of experience in various sectors of public health that has included work on a variety of issues in the academic research, government, nonprofit, and community arenas. Both rural and urban. She has managed efforts with communitybased organizations, county and state health departments, and community coalitions. So welcome, Sue, and I will hand it over to you now.
> SUSAN WATSON, MPH: Thanks, Laura, and thank you all for joining us. I want to start by showing a little bit of who might be participating today. I'm having some technical issues of my slides not advancing.
> LAURA BURR: Hi, Sue, I'll go ahead and advance for you.
> SUSAN WATSON, MPH: They're not advancing.
> LAURA BURR: I think we're just having a little delay in WebEx, but I'll go ahead and move them for you.
> SUSAN WATSON, MPH: Great. Well, we had over 260 registrants from across the United States and even some located internationally, which is fantastic. The registrants were predominantly from nonprofit organizations and local or state government entities, but there appears to be a really good mix of sectors represented showing the broad interest in this topic.
Before we jump into the presentations, I want to share a little bit about CA4Health. It is a community of practice that works across California to unite partners and leverage capacity around chronic decide prevention and health equity. We are excited to showcase examples that highlight the power of community organizing, mobilization, and civic engagement to drive change. I was fortunate enough to attend the California endowment building healthy communities conference earlier this year, and heard about some of the exciting work of our presenters. They are cultivating and engaging community leaders and challenging institutions all in the spirit of healthier and more engaged communities.
I also want to note that we had a presenter who is going to share on his work in Watsonville around diabetes, but unfortunately he had to bow out on participating today. He's deep in the final push on the November ballot in the Bay area, so his schedule got really over packed. But we still have two fantastic stories to hear about. The speakers will give their presentations, then we'll have time for some brief specific Q&A after each, and more time after they're done for further discussion. So feel free to type your questions in throughout the presentations in the Q&A box as Laura described.
And one more note. We will be showing a short video as part of the second presentation. Depending on your internet speed and connections, there may be a slight delay while the video loads, and you may experience some buffering on your end while viewing. To reduce issues while viewing you should minimize the number of open applications on your computer. If you experience starts and stops, don't leave the webinar. You will be synced back to the presentation when Eli returns to the slides.
So to get us going, I would like to introduce Victor Gonzalez. Victor works in his hometown as the civic engagement manager and youth coordinator at the eastern Coachella Valley building healthy communities. Take it away. We will pass you the presenter's ball and you'll need to unmute yourself.
Are we able to, Laura, to unmute Victor? There we go.
> VICTOR GONZALEZ: Cool. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, everybody, for making this happen for the great folks that are listening. My name is Victor Gonzalez. First, I'm going to talk a little bit about what building healthy communities is, for those of you who might not know the work. It is an initiative that came out of the California endowment. It's a tenyear initiative where in the middle, in the sixth year of the initiative. And it's an initiative that spans all across California with 14 communities over 14BHD sites. And a focus of building healthy communities has is to improve employment opportunities, education, housing, neighborhood safety, unhealthy environmental conditions and access to healthy foods, and much more. The sites have picked up on things that are important to each site. In the Coachella Valley, for example, we focus on schools, prevention, access to health care, and also in neighborhoods. So getting access to infrastructure. I can expand a little bit of what that means in a local context.
> SUSAN WATSON, MPH: This is Sue. I just want to make sure that if you have slides, that you advance them.
> VICTOR GONZALEZ: Perfect. Thank you so much, Susan.
So yeah, our focus on building healthy communities is to make sure that usually when I used to think of being healthy, it was about having access to a doctor, make sure that I was eating healthy, and that is very important. But one of the priorities we have is looking at our neighborhoods in the local context in which we grow up in, and understanding the our health conditions, how they are affected by outside forces.
So you know, one example is that we focus in school so making sure that people understand the community understands the budget process, how they can be engaged and the implementation of tax money going into the schools, it's important for the communities to understand that they have a say in how this money is being spent. The other thing is making sure that people have access to health care regardless of document status. And I mention with infrastructure, there's a lot of trailer parks in our community, for example, that are not connected to water grids or sewer systems and don't have pavement. These are things that we focus on, being a rural site. It might look a little bit different from urban areas.
So we have a lot of issues with Transportation, you know? And basic infrastructural things that I just mentioned. So, for us, the community has collaborated and we felt that Vota, which is the initiative for engaging people civically is one of the things that we have focused on as a collaborative.
So, you know, I just want to make sure that I want to say that right off the bat, that I have a lot of pictures. There's really no words on my slides. So if you want to take notes or listen, that's really great. Just know that I'm just going to be showing pictures as I speak.
So the Vota campaign is getting voters to participate and make sure there is links with being civically engaged to having better health and overall wellness. So our mission is to improve the health of people within the community as they engage civically. So Vota emphasizes the importance of youth forces. It empowers the disenfranchised population. There is a clear distinction from the west side to the east side which has service jobs and agriculture and things like that. For us, we feel it's time our community has always been empowered, but I feel like we have been missing structure. So through the campaign and working collaboratively, we have really jumped the numbers as to how many people have been engaged civically within the school council, within community councils and things like that. For us, Vota is something as a community that we hold very strong.
In addition to that, so I work with very closely with youth across two high schools, and they are part of the youth organizing council. And they have also taken up their own civic engagement, which is the Y vote, the youth vote. It's a coalition within southern California with organizations that are targeting voters between the ages of 18 to 35 to make sure that the message is clear to make sure that they are one of the important young voters in California that can make an impact in the next election. Some of the things that the youth focus on is making sure, since we're a nonprofit, we can't say who people can vote for, what ballot issues they should vote for. We make sure our volunteers are aware of that. But we do want to make sure that we engage people so that they can engage civically, and the way we reach out to the voters is they have the ability to change rules within how people are sentenced, for example. Or they have a chance to influence how spending is prioritize in California. So those are some of the things that our youth are taking up.
Some of the youth are not eligible to vote, so it's up to them to outreach to people that can and remind them about the importance of why we do this. Historically, we are a community that, you know, is composed of immigrants from mostly from Mexico and other areas in Latin America. It's an area that is often neglected when it comes down to decision making or people running for office or prioritizing what the needs of the community are. I'm sure there are many other communities from the listeners that share some of these struggles. So, for us, it's important to make sure that people recognize that we are a community that deserves to be listened to. And one way that we're doing that is to make sure that we outreach to people that can make that difference.
As I go forward, I want to explain that the leadership development that we have follows a linear path. Although it is not linear, we try to think of it in those terms, and we try to engage people, so build awareness of what's going on with building healthy communities and what the coalition is about. After we develop an awareness, we find ways of supporting people with things that they want to change in the community. After that we try to engage them in other ways where they can contribute to the actions that are happening. And our end goal is to make sure that people are leading the work that needs to happen in the community.
The work that I do, I am a facilitator to make sure that we provide the tools for our young leaders, our parents to be civically engaged to prepare them for the process. How to speak at council meetings, you know? Skills that I think are sometimes overlooked in our community, those are the foundation for creating the empowerment to say something, and having the feeling that they can actually do it. For us, we engage. We build awareness.
And you know, we try to move them as much as possible into them contributing their ideas and their dreams to eventually lead into action.
One of the biggest focuses that we have here, and we identified as a coalition, Building Healthy Communities. One is civic engagement over community. Second, the youth leadership that we want to see. The youth leadership is very important, because we often engage and I think it has to do with a variety of factors, working conditions that many of our parents go through. The lack of attention that our students in our schools I have often taken the role of supplementing what is missing from schools, and that's the ability to dream and the ability to be engaged in places where actions can happen. Oftentimes I have the students do a basic drawing, and you know, these are high school students that I mostly engage with. And sometimes they share with me, you know what? I don't want to I don't feel like I can draw. I'm not creative. I can't do this. For me it's reinvokingthat it's up to us to really envision what we want to see in it. I spent a lot of time developing a narrative with the students of where they come from, who they are at this moment.
Just because our goal is to engage them civically, that's very important. But I've noticed that I can't engage students without first identifying what's important to them. So for me and for the collaborative, it's, you know, engaging in their stories. Their stories of where they come from. And the reason why this is important is because, you know, we might have some students that feel like they need to leave the Coachella Valley because there is nothing being offered to them to expand their leadership. For us, it's like what are things we can do to engage them. It starts with engagement and it starts with students standing up for themselves.
This will kind of be like my closing remark. The main important thing is that we want to do is develop relationships with the community. Here our focus is not to be highlighted in the work that has been happening. We have identified that, you know, if people work alone, it's easier for them to get things done or get those victories. But, if we don't move forward as a community, then the sustainability piece is what's missing. You know? We don't want to do things as an organization, we want to do things as a community. It's important for us to pass it on to the community. I am from here, too. I'm a community member. It's important for me to share that knowledge of what and not being fearful of somebody one day taking the roles that I'm in. That's what I always reiterate with the students. I remind them this is where I'm at. This is where you can go.
So I think dealing with young people, parents, or you know, parent leaders, just remind them of the importance of the work that they are engaging in. So for that, you know, I have here base building. One of the things that we have identified as one of the biggest factors of developing this relationship is having followup. Sometimes I engage a lot in the work and I can't call people and remind them, you know, just thanking them for the work when we have actions. That is one of the biggest things that I have taken with me is just following up with people.
Another thing that I have taken up is following the line of the youth leadership is having them engaged with the community. As you can see here, community forums, so we make sure that the youth are the ones planning the events. We give them the spotlight, you know? It's not up to me to say I did this event and I should be glorified for it. That's not what the intentions that we have here. So the sooner we can get them up stage, the sooner we can get them to planning, the better we feel and the more we feel that our efforts are taking place.
So, here's a picture of an event that the students led. The parents and people show up and we have the students thank them for being there. The connection with the youth is really important for the community. With that I would like to end it. I know it's probably better for me to kind of get questions. I know that I kind of glossed over a lot of things and a lot of details, but I kind of wanted to give an overview and go over the values which are important to me, which is civic engagement and finding the empowerment within each individual and spending time to really develop an individual's narrative and find what moves them. What moves me may be different from what moves a student.