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.

The LA Access to Health Coverage Coalition was established in 2002 to increase access to quality, affordable health insurance programs for low-income individuals in Los Angeles County. This report examines how Coalition agencies have adopted Outreach, Enrollment, Retention and Utilization strategies to enroll children into public insurance programs. It focuses on the unique approaches Coalition members have adopted to reach uninsured, eligible children and families.

More than 20,000 individuals in California are trained as “Certified Application Assistants” to help families enroll in and maintain their public healthcare coverage. While the profession has grown and evolved through the years, very little is known about this dynamic workforce that bridges children and families to healthcare coverage and services. To assess the potential to advance the CAA profession, Community Health Councils conducted a survey of CAAs in Los Angeles County. Read the resulting report, Bridging the Health Divide: California’s Certified Application Assistants.

The South Los Angeles Health Equity Scorecard documents the inequities in South LA's healthcare and physical resource environments and challenges city and county officials to take action on policy recommendations for a healthy community. The study calculated scores for 50 socioeconomic and environmental factors that influence health behaviors and outcomes, comparing South Los Angeles to West LA and LA County as a whole. The Scorecard is intended to guide the policy agenda for South LA and provides key recommendations along with the agencies responsible for their implementation.

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.

The Toolkit is a companion piece to the Policy Framework for Outreach, Enrollment, Retention, & Utilization. The Framework provided the outline for California and its counties to structure and define OERU policies. The Toolkit is an additional resource that presents specific strategies to strengthen and build OERU.

This report describes the experiences and successes of local programs, such as Children's Health Initiatives, in providing health coverage to all children and families throughout California.

This paper, published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, reports on the examination of resource environments within a CDC-funded project directed by CHC 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.

California still faces the reality of more than 800,000 uninsured children. This policy brief identifies future challenges and opportunities and puts forward principles to strengthen outreach, enrollment, retention and utilization in California.

This report, published in the American Journal of Public Health and conducted by UCLA and USC researchers in partnership with CHC, examined the availability of restaurants and food options within these restaurants in more and less affluent areas of Los Angeles to compared 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.

The fourth brief in a series focusing on quality improvement strategies for Medi-Cal manged care and other public coverage programs. This brief reviews quality assurance systems for all children's health coverage programs and identifies opportunities to improve monitoring, oversight, and quality of care.