Promotores de Salud: The front line of defense in combating childhood obesity to reduce the chronic disease burden among Latino families

Purpose: Obesity is a serious risk factor for many chronic diseases (diabetes, heart disease, cancer). Children and youth in the Latino community face potential for a shorter life span than their parents - accompanied by disease- due in part to childhood obesity. Promotores de salud have always been in the Latino community one of the most important resources for outreach and education. They now stand as the front line of defense to combat this epidemic in our Latino community. Several programs at the USC Childhood Obesity Research Center (CORC) (the Center of Excellence for Minority Youth and the Transdisciplinary Research Center on Energetics and Cancer (TREC)) support the translation of the most up to date scientific findings to community workers for the prompt delivery into grass roots level public health education efforts. Methods: Through a community based participatory collaboration, the University of Southern California CORC (academic partner) and Esperanza Community Housing Corporation (ECHC) (a social justice non-profit community based organization who is our community partner) have been conducting capacity building among promotores de salud to disseminate state-of the art scientific information on childhood obesity. Our goal is to shorten the time between scientific discovery and delivery of life saving information and messages at the community level. Results: We present evaluation results from our various joint efforts and discuss the outcomes of the dissemination of information effort. Results point to increased advocacy among pomotores de salud, helping to shape what is consumed in the schools and communities; increasing access to healthy food choices and reducing access to unhealthy competitive products. We discuss our participatory model and the impact of our partnership on combating Latino childhood obesity.