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Bree C. Kessler, MSW, MPH, MS, University of Michigan, School of Public Health, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, 248-410-3813, breekessler@yahoo.com

Fotovoz/Photovoice Honduras presents a community-based participatory action research methodology. Photovoice provides individuals in a community with cameras so that they have tools to document and discuss personally significant aspects of their daily lives and subsequently voice their perspectives and needs to community health workers, influential community leaders, and policymakers. Improving on the standard means of community assessment, the process of taking photographs enables a collective examination, analysis, and exhibition of pictures. This process ultimately results in an increased a stronger sense of group solidarity and long-term policy change.

The Photovoice project included three groups of participants: women from the immediate Morazán, Honduras community, women from Pavón, a small village in the mountains surrounding Morazán, and men from the staff of a local environmental non-governmental organization (NGO). Common themes existed between the groups' photographs such as deforestation, home/family, agricultural work, water, and self-efficacy/agency. The photos and discussion groups provided a much needed gender analysis of why the women participants had a high awareness of environmental responsibilities such as how environmental factors affected their health, but they did not have the means, nor did they act to exercise their environmental rights and change their behavior. The photographs confirmed that the program priorities of the local NGO were not addressing the needs of the women in the community and a gendered environmental health agenda was necessary for improving health and environmental burdens of the entire community.

Learning Objectives: