Engaging Urban Minority Youth to Address Health Inequities: Using Animation for Community Health Education and Health Promotion as part of STEM/Science Enrichment

Youth can have important roles in public health improvement efforts. Health and STEM/ science education can support youth-driven health education efforts by providing content knowledge, opportunities to learn about the social contexts of health, as well as exposure and instruction in new mediums, such as animation, for use in local health education and health promotion efforts.

An afterschool STEM/science enrichment program employing a health equity framework, targeting Black and Latino youth in a public middle school in the Jamaica Plain (JP) neighborhood of Boston, MA, supported youths’ development of health education and health promotion messages using stop motion animation (SAM). Messages focused on stress and diseases that present disparities in JP, including asthma, diabetes, hypertension, and CVD. Youth used what they learned to increase knowledge and awareness of disparities, and developed messages targeting youth, the school context, and wider community.

A new analysis method was developed to examine the animations for content knowledge and accuracy. Data on the strengths and limitations of using SAM as a messaging medium was collected through student focus groups and interviews with program staff.

Results indicate SAM is an effective medium to engage youth in local outreach on health and disparities, whereby youth can create “stories” to help increase knowledge and awareness about diseases that present disparities as well as prevention, at the local level. Moreover, this allows youth to leverage lived experience and knowledge of their communities and how social factors impact health among their peers, families, and the wider community, to effect change.