Who can learn from this?

We hope that this web site will reach many different people. It is in Spanish and English to make sure that our communities can benefit from the experiences of this project.

We also want service providers to learn how to make their services more accessible to people from different linguistic and ethnoracial backgrounds.

Educators or trainers interested in implementing courses about lay health promotion and/or participatory research might find the sections on the training component useful.

Community activitists and leaders might benefit from reviewing sections about outreach and building the capacity of the community.

If you are a researcher, some of our experiences with implementing participatory action research will interest you. Many of the research tools in both English and Spanish and some of the articles that were published about this project are included in the resources section.

What is the purpose of this website?

• Tell you how we planned, implemented and evaluated the Mujer Sana - Comunidad Sana Project.
• Let you read about this participatory action research project in Spanish or in English.
• Describe our health promotion model and project structure.
• Describe how we build community capacity: Latin American Women organizing.
• Illustrate how lay health promoters worked with women in the community: Stories.
• Describe key conceptual frameworks on which the model was based.
• Share some of the tools we used to implement this project: Resources.
• Share what we have learned, in the key findings and resources developed for this project.
• Describe key moments and events that helped this project to be successful: project chronology .
• Transfer knowledge to other communities: Key Findings.

Hispanic Women

If you are a Spanish-speaking woman living in Ottawa you might want to learn more about LAZO.

LAZO's up-coming activities are listed in the What's New section and are updated frequently.

Do you want to become involved? Call 233-4443 or write to us: lazo@mujersana.ca.

Do you want to find out what we did to reach out to our community?
See project chronology and Latin American women organizing.

Do you want to know what we found out? The key findings will tell you about the results of the research, what worked, and what did not work so well.

Do you want to know how the Lay Health Promoters helped other women? Read their stories.

Hispanic community

If you are from the Hispanic-Canadian community, you may want to know how we started the project. See the project chronology.

For some information about the Hispanic community in Ottawa, see the section on Latin American women organizing.

To read about the research results, and what we would do differently the next time, see key findings.

Program managers or service providers

How well is your organization currently serving people from ethnocultural minority backgrounds?

Are you are trying to improve outreach and program uptake? Let us share our experiences, ideas and insights about building the capacity of an organization. You may want to review the case study and learn what happened at the community health centre that housed this project.

Are you working in an immigrant serving agency, and aware of the need to address women's health issues and other community needs? See if the lay health promotion model described in Mujer Sana - Comunidad Sana project could work for your organization.

Are you looking for a new approach to community health education? You may want to learn about the participatory action research approach that worked for us.

Are you seeking to involve the community in determining ways that your organization can meet their needs? We tried to do the same thing - find out how. Go to health promotion activities and outreach and involving the community.

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Community activists, advocates or leaders

Are you involved as a volunteer with an ethnocultural minority community? Are you committed to working towards social justice, equal access and social change? Are you among those who believe we can make our diverse society more equitable? So are we! You might find ideas and strategies to adapt to your own community in the project model, focusing on community capacity building and on health promotion activities and outreach. Here you will find information about some of the ways we did outreach, and some of the things that worked well with our community. You also might find interesting how we tried to link research and practice. The project chronology provides an idea of how the project developed over time.

Educators or Trainers

If you are an adult educator, especially if you are working with newcomer or immigrant communities, you may find the training section useful. It describes how we developed and implemented a bilingual course (Spanish and English) for community leaders with diverse educational backgrounds and academic skills. You will find a detailed training curriculum with objectives for each session, resource suggestions, assignments, and some background material. Since the course was offered as a university credit course and as a college certificate course, you may also be interested in the accreditation process. Go to the training evaluation for more detail.

Researchers

Are you interested in participatory research, action research, and community-based research? We would like to share our experiences and learnings in these areas, as described in linking research and practice. Since Mujer Sana - Comunidad Sana is a demonstration project, research was an integral part of the work we all did. The section about the conceptual frameworks outlines our theoretical frameworks and methodological approach. The key findings provide an overview of research results. Many of the data collection tools which we used are listed in the resources section. Lay Health Promoters were also trained and worked as participatory researchers, as described in the section on training community leaders. They share their experiences combining lay health promotion with participatory research in the Stories section.