Salud Familiar en McKinley: Dreams, actions, and commitments for a healthy Latino community

Salud Familiar en McKinley is a community-university partnership designed to co-create the culture and confidence for health among the families of McKinley Elementary School, a public school serving a low-income, Mexican immigrant population. Although many models exist for designing a program incorporating lay health workers, community organizing, family health, and service-learning, Salud Familiar was deliberately conceived in cultural humility and grew with the emerging vision and dreams of the mothers, children, school personnel, and college students who began working together four years ago. Now engaging 60 mothers and 300 college students each year, and serving over 1500 family members, Salud Familiar is a well-recognized asset for quality of life and community health. The strength of this unique partnership lies in its hybrid framework, derived from abiding public health commitments to equity social justice, and prevention, and Mexican commitments to familia, respeto, comunidad, educacion, sencilles, humilde, sacrificio, and valores. Also key to project effectiveness has been the department's commitment to making choices that matter and “that which is not given away is lost.” This presentation will describe the growing relationship of the mothers, children, and college students as they work together on activities rooted in powerful immigrant dreams. Resource and evaluation considerations for a quality of life intervention in a measurement and disease-oriented funding environment will be discussed, along with the challenges – and ultimate contributions – of differences in orientation to time, priorities, and unit of analysis between the community, university, and early supporters. Voices of community participants will be integrated throughout.