Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Zoe Clayson, ScD, Health Education, San Francisco State University, 2555 Leavenworth St. #306, San Francisco, CA 94133, 415 640 7275, zoeclay@sfsu.edu, Sarah Ramirez, MPH, Stanford University, PhD Candidate, Modern Thought and Literature, 625 E. Southview Ave., Visalia, CA 93292, and Nuria Ciofalo, PhD, Evaluation, The California Endowment, 1000 North Alameda Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012.

Over the past two years six towns in California's Tulare and Monterey counties have been developing a placed-based approach to community building. This intervention, Poder Popular, is part of the larger Agricultural Workers Health Initiative funded by the California Endowment. The underlying assumption of this work is that raising the authentic voices of agricultural workers will empower them and improve the overall health of the community over time.

This presentation will focus on an innovative visual arts approach being used to document the Poder Popular story and engage the community in developing their strategies for community building. Two complementary techniques are being employed: photo voice and digital storytelling. The photo voice component engages youth, women, and indigenous farmworkers directly while the digital storytelling components functions on a train-the-trainer model training intervention coordinators and staff to use the technology to create stories.

These visuals coupled with historical photos of the towns are shaped for use as traveling exhibits in the towns, as data for evaluation, and as communication strategies to tell the story to wider audiences. Text from interviews with community members narrates the visual story. A web-based system that houses English and Spanish visual and textual materials is included in the design.

The authors will discuss how simple photography can be combined with more sophisticated technology, such as digital stories and web-based approaches, for use in program planning and evaluation conducted in a culturally competent fashion. The challenges of these approaches to influence community power dynamics also will be addressed

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will be able to discuss how photoVoice, digital storytelling, and web-based technology can be used in community building.
• Participants will be able to list three key challenges to using these popular education approaches in Spanish speaking communities
• Participants will recognize the potential of multi media approaches to supporting community empowerment

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation