Salud America! Promoting Health for Latino Kids

Salud America! is a national Latino health equity-focused organization that creates culturally relevant and research-based stories, videos, and tools to inspire people to start and support healthy changes to policies, systems, and environments where Latino and all children and families can equitably live, learn, work, and play. Latinos are a rising U.S. powerhouse, but they face barriers to be their healthiest and suffer high rates of obesity and other health disparities and inequities. Salud America!’s award-winning multimedia communications help our social and online network—more than 200,000 moms and dads, providers, and community and school leaders—push for healthy changes in the areas of Healthy Families and Schools, Healthy Neighborhoods and Communities, and Healthy and Cohesive Cultures. Salud America! is led by health disparities researcher Dr. Amelie G. Ramirez and supported by a passionate team of communicators at UT Health San Antonio, thanks to funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Principle Investigators

Amelie G. Ramirez, DrPH IHPR, UT Health San Antonio

Co-Investigators

Rosalie Aguilar, IHPR, UT Health San Antonio Patricia Chalela,DrPH, IHPR, UT Health San Antonio

Location

A national program based at the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio

Conclusions

Salud maintains an existing online network of over 200,000 Latino parents, school & community leaders, health leaders, (and dozens of partnerships) via online, social media, and email channels, enabling efficient dissemination of information and action-oriented data and tools.

Salud has the only U.S. Latino-focused, proven, adaptable multimedia health equity communication structure. The structure produces: Culturally relevant, theory-driven multimedia content on health equity, such as news on policy and system changes across the nation, peer model stories and videos, infographics, and other content; interactive "action packs" to engage and fuel advocates, schools, and community organizations toward big on-the-ground healthy changes; campaigns to engage people to raise their voice for system and policy change; social media messaging to advance health messages and behaviors; #SaludTues Tweetchats on Twitter engage 7M in just 1 hour/week.

Milestones include: 171 narrative role model cases studies, called Salud Heroes, published online with accompanying documentary videos for 109 stories and 46 social-media-friendly videos; 300+ school district leaders have downloaded our Trauma-Sensitive School Action Pack to craft a system to support traumatized kids; 130+ school advocates have downloaded our School Food Pantry Action Pack to start pantries in schools to alleviate hunger and reduce food insecurity; Salud members submitted 73% of public comments HHS got to shape the next edition of Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 11% of public comments USDA got to help shape the next Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and 12% of public comments FDA got in favor of menu labeling; #SaludTues Tweetchats have created 1.8 billion impressions on Twitter since 2014.

In a survey of Salud network members, data showed a strong correlation between the degree of engagement in Salud communication and advocacy actions at four levels (school, local, state, federal). Using its model, Salud’s 300+ core network members have produced 179 Latino childhood health policy wins and another 96 general public health policy wins (a policy win = something passed by a relevant voting body) in the past 12 months, according to a 2018 independent evaluation report by the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition. This can be extrapolated to estimate that many thousands of additional policy wins have been achieved across the entire network of more than 200,000 members.

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