As with many community initiatives, Mujer Sana - Comunidad
Sana was born from a combination of community need, good ideas,
organizational experience, motivated individuals, and available funding.
In some ways, the 'starting date' is actually many years before the
Ontario Women's Health Council
generously funded the demonstration phase of the project.
A volunteer group of Hispanic women LAZO
began to build community capacity around health issues in 1992. Over
eight years, LAZO developed strong links with a downtown community health
centre located in downtown Ottawa: Centretown
Community Health Centre (CCHC). LAZO activities and programs of
the past five years laid the foundation for a lay health promoter approach.
The Ontario Women's Health Council asked for proposals to demonstrate
how to reach marginalized women with a cancer screening message. One
of the LAZO madrinas who works as a community-based
researcher Gentium Consulting
volunteered to help the group develop the research proposal for this
project. Since Gentium Consulting and the Community
Health Research Unit (CHRU) had also worked together, this led to
involvement of CHRU as the fourth partner.
Mujer Sana - Comunidad Sana focuses on breast and cervical cancer screening in
the context of a broader concern for women's health, the family, and the whole community.
Trained community leaders become lay health promoters and participatory researchers. They reach out
to isolated Hispanic women to provide health education, and learn to understand community needs better.
They also reach out to service providing organizations, to help them improve services to minority communities.
The broader community also participates in Mujer Sana - Comunidad Sana
through an Advisory Committee, with health professionals;
cancer screening organizations; public health; women's research experts;
two universities; a community college; immigrant settlement organizations;
and other ethno-cultural minority groups.
The demonstration project studied how useful it was to adapt a comprehensive,
lay health-promotion, community capacity
building, similar to one used with disadvantaged, rural,
or uninsured populations in other places (US, Latin America) to the
specific conditions of a large Canadian city. After the demonstration
phase is finished, we hope to continue some activities with the Hispanic
community. We are also transferring our knowledge and skills to help
other ethnic minority communities address health issues using a similar
model.
Go to Mujer Sana - Comunidad Sana project
for details about the training, research, and programming.
