Community Health & Education

CHC's African Americans Building a Legacy of Health is the organizing movement within our Community Health & Education policy area. AABLH develops community support and local leadership to champion a healthier lifestyle within the South Los Angeles. Funded under the REACH US Initiative, the overall goal of AABLH is to reduce disparities in cardiovascular disease and diabetes. AABLH is a partnership of community- and faith-based organizations, businesses, community stakeholders, university researchers, and local government.

Community Health & Education supports three coalitions: Food Policy Roundtable, Food Resource Development, and Coalition for an Active South LA;  and two community campaigns: Greater Baldwin Hills Alliance and the Neighborhood Food Watch.

CHC's Related Policy Reports
Fast Food Restaurant Report: Promoting Healthy Dining in South Los Angeles. This report recommends policy and systems changes the City and County of Los Angeles can adopt to limit the density of fast food restaurants in South LA, while encouraging the development of new healthy restaurants of all types.

Transforming the Urban Food Desert from the Grassroots Up: A Model for Change. Confronted by continuing health disparities in vulnerable communities, CHC worked with research partners to develop a community change model to address the root causes of health disparities. This article from Family & Community Health discusses how CHC's model led to public policy interventions in a food desert.

Food Desert to Food Oasis: Promoting Grocery Store Development in South Los Angeles. Ready access to healthy foods is taken for granted in most neighborhoods. But that is not the case for the residents of South Los Angeles. This report examines how policymakers, the grocery industry and community members can change the South LA retail food environment.

Does Race Define What's in the Shopping Cart? While cultural factors are most often cited in other studies as reasons for poor health in communities of color, this study shows the extent to which cultural factors are overshadowed by food choices in African American communities.

Assessing Resource Environments to Target Prevention Interventions in Community Chronic Disease Control This paper from the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved examines resource environments within a CDC-funded project led by CHC conducted in partnership with USC and UCLA researchers. The project developed a methodology for assessing environments that integrates measures of location, quality and cost in evaluating a community's access to nutritious foods and physical activity options.

African Americans' Access to Healthy Food Options in South Los Angeles Restaurants Restaurants Published in the American Journal of Public Health and conducted by UCLA and USC researchers in partnership with CHC, this report examines the availability of restaurants and food options  in more and less affluent areas of Los Angeles to compare residents' access to healthy meals prepared and purchased away from home. The study concluded that support for the healthy lifestyle associated with lower risks for disease is difficult in poorer communities with a higher proportion of African American residents.

Improving the Nutritional Resource Environment for Healthy Living Through Community-based Participatory Research This study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, assessed the nutritional resource environment in targeted African American areas of LA County to contrast the findings with a predominantly white area. The results showed that the targeted area was significantly less likely to have important items for a healthier life.

Watch a video compiled by Katherine Alexander on South LA's Food Desert with Lark Galloway-Gilliam and Gwendolyn Flynn.