Oakland Dons Final Report

The Oakland DONS’ Present…

F i n a l R e p o r t f o r

Y o u t h B u i l d i n g H e a l t h y C o m m u n i t i e s A y - p a r p r o j e c t

O a k l a n d , C a l i f o r n i a F a l l 2 0 1 0

A Youth-Led project with Youth Noise, Link Media, and Youth Together

Media

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Who are the people creating the change?

Where are they?

! We are YBHC (Youth Building Healthy Communities). We are a collective group of

youth from Oakland, California who originated from an organization called Youth Noise.

Our main focus for this research project is to bring health and healthy habits back to our

community. Through research, we were able to collect data and get concrete answers

about the critical health issues existing in Oakland neighborhoods. Our team is youth-led

and advised by Lauren Hauser and Aaron Nakai, our adult allies who have helped us

along the way. Through this project, we learned what it means to have a healthy body

and live healthy lifestyles; we can now go into our communities and take action to

promote healthy living with the skills and knowledge we’ve gained.

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Our Goal

When we first started, we as youth didn’t understand exactly what ‘health’ meant

to us. Our goal for this project was to find the reasons why we as a community are

generally unhealthy. The first part of the project was to learn about our definition of health

in order to get a better grasp on the health issues in Oakland. We see ‘health’ as more

than just our physical well being, but our community well being, and having opportunities

to feel safe, valued and happy. Next, we went into the streets and found community

members who were willing to discuss health topics with us. We figured in order to help our

people it is necessary to hear the ideas and thoughts directly from their mouths. Now that

we have collected and analyzed the data, our next goal is to develop action plans to

promote healthier lifestyles for the people of Oakland.

Our Vision When we first started the project we: watched our family members struggle with

obesity and diabetes, saw our peers dealing with severe mental health issues, witnessed

racism within our schools, and noticed the lack of preventive health knowledge within our

families. After identifying these issues we learned that this is not how people in Oakland

should live, we feel our community deserves better. We envision a city where: healthy

foods are easily accessible, community members create a strong social support group

and invest in youth development, neighborhoods are free from racial violence, and where

access to health care and opportunities for success is a right and not a privilege.


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Methods

We began our research project by attending a two-day training on youth-led

participatory action research (YPAR). We came together as a group to discuss and map

what wasn’t healthy about Oakland and what a better community would look like to us.

In-depth discussions and community mapping helped us visualize what a healthy Oakland

would look like and how Oaklanders would participate in creating our ideal utopia. From

this YPAR training, we learned important concepts and research techniques that would

further help us in defining our research goals and vision for Oakland. We felt that YPAR

methodology was essential for this research project because we are the people who are

being affected by health disparities in Oakland. As low-income youth of color, we see the

health problems on the street, at school, and at home, thus, it gives us greater access to

community members and resources that outside researchers would not normally have.

With the special access we had to community members, we were able to conduct: one

on one interviews, surveys, and focus groups with over 100 Oaklanders.

Our Themes We decided, after our community mapping and analyzing our community, the four

main topics we would focus on would be:

1. Nutritional Health

2. Health Education

3. Mental Health

4. Cultural Education


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Our Research Question In our research process, we had to come up with one main question that we would

try to answer. Our question was: “How can we develop sustainable youth leaders in

Oakland to understand and model preventative health practices, have consciousness of

their own cultures and be knowledgeable of others?”

Data Analysis

Once we had gathered our data, we all got together as a group and went through

every piece, in order to come up collectively with what we felt were our strongest findings.

One process in which we chose our findings was to go through the data and see which

pieces of information connected directly back to our research question. If we felt it was

strong enough to answer our research question, then we used the data to create our

findings.

Our findings were refined even more as we continued to analyze which finding

would best answer our overall question. When our refining process was over, we put the

findings into neatly organized templates and decided what our visions for each finding

would be. In addition, we created our recommendations to make sure the finding

became an actual plan of action. Here is what we found:

!

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Finding Most Families of color that answered

our survey said they choose to eat

fast food versus cooking at home at

least once a week.

Sub-Finding Fast food diets are contributing to

higher overweight and obesity rates

among African American and Latino

families in Oakland.

Supporting Data: • When asked, ‘How many fast food meals do you and your family eat per week?’

44.8% of the people we surveyed said they eat fast food 2-6 times a week.

• “A lot of our people, especially Mexican folks, are eating like, you put grease on top

of grease on top of grease with a little piece of meat maybe one veggie, and that’s

considered healthy.” –Esteban Cuaya (Student at Chabo College)

• “You learn your habits at home. Whether their healthy or unhealthy habits, I think a

lot of that comes from the house.” -Youth Particpant In Focus Group

• “I feel like unfortunate, historically it[‘s] a trend that our communities are unhealthy

Our Findings…

Food Justice


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therefore we learn an unhealthy way of living. A lot of it also is on television, the

different things, and the images that children get fed at an early age. On one hand

they look at a commercial that says get your five servings of vegetables a day, and

then a Fruitloops commercial comes on, its just difficult.” –Lodgi (Youth Together

Staff)

• “Exercising daily and eating healthy food makes you healthy, but getting a hold of

healthy food is what the problem is.” –Malakia (Student at Oakland High School)

• In the 2008-09 school year, 29.1% of 5th and 7th grade students in [Alameda] County

were overweight. (California FitnessGram, California Department of Education,

2008-09)

• Of all 18 school districts in Alameda County, Oakland was ranked 4th, at 36.4%, for

having a high percentage of overweight children in 5th and 7th grades. (California

FitnessGram, California Department of Education, 2008-09)

• Statewide, California is home to 14,823 fast-food restaurants and 6,659 convenience

stores. By contrast, the state has 3,853 supermarkets and 1,292 produce stands

(including farmers markets) (California Center for Public Health Advocacy)

• Currently, there are no grocery stores in West Oakland (California Center for Public

Health Advocacy)

Our Vision When we were going over our results from the surveys, and reviewing our notes from

the focus groups we realized that the need for nutritional education, as well as the need

for healthier foods and access to them, was going to be one of our strongest findings

within the entire project.

It is because of this that we collectively decided to come up with a plan of real

action. In other words, we want to take extra time in order to make sure that what we

need and want on this particular finding will be solid.


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Recommendations: We have a number of recommendations and projects:

• We want to learn more about the idea of “Food Justice” in our community, and

work with other organizations to dive deeper into what this means. We want to

involve more youth in this project. We will apply to a “Just Food” program to try and

get additional grant money to complete our project recommendations.

• In order to give people other alternatives to fast food, we want to turn the vacant

lots in Oakland into beautiful gardens and have community members care for the

gardens. We feel it would be unrealistic to try and work on all the abandoned

spaces, but we can have a few to start off with. We will work with Youth

Empowerment School to create a bigger garden in the backyard that will serve as

an educational space and a place for young people to gather food.

• We want our school to have an elective class after school completely dedicated to

keeping the garden in top shape. When the garden has a consistent group taking

care of it, we will be able to expand it so that we can include a wider variety of

vegetables, and be able to use those veggies to make school lunches.

• In order to have more fresh food options, we will start a youth friendly contest

around artistic expression of local gardens. We will ask to claim a specific area for

themselves in and around their homes, schools, churches etc, and decorate it any

way they want. In Oakland, many of the boys in our neighborhoods decorate their

cars with paint, big rims and loudspeakers. There are also projects where young

people decorate their bikes. We thought, “How amazing would it be if they took

that same creativity and turned it towards their plot of land!” We will have contests

monthly to see which plot of land is most creative, and we will give prizes to the

winners like new plants, or gardening supplies. We will promote it on the website and

work with partners to get it started.

• We will also try and start a coupon program. In Oakland, people pass out ‘free fast

food’ coupons on the street. We thought, why don’t we pass out “free apples’ or

other fruits and vegetable cards with cooking recipes instead. We will partner with

local gardens to see if they would donate a number of foods, and then more

people will know where to find healthier foods.


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Health Education

Finding There is a lack of education around

primary prevention in schools and in

households as well as primary

prevention promotion in Oakland.

Sub-Finding Youth and families in Oakland do not understand the levels of prevention, nor do they

know where to seek health education to prevent health issues such as, substance abuse

and smoking, risk of chronic illness, teen pregnancy and STDs, and obesity.

Supporting Data: • Although 54.2% of the people surveyed said they do not know what preventative

healthcare meant, over 57.3% of the people surveyed believe that by focusing on

prevention and preventative healthcare, their community’s health will greatly

improve.

• 82.4% of the people surveyed know someone who currently does not have

healthcare coverage.

• “There needs to be education, especially health education [in our schools]

happening.” –Fela Thomas (Director of Youth Center at YES)


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Our Vision We envision a visible and active health education system in Oakland where people

know were to seek services at all levels of prevention. We want people in Oakland to

understand the practices of prevention so they can keep themselves and their families

healthy. For example, community health education will be emphasized in schools,

churches, and other community engagement outlets by developing pamphlets that will

educate community members how prevention practices prevent premature death.

Additionally, we have a vision that all Oaklanders will have access to affordable health

care and no one can be denied services.

Recommendations: In order to make small steps toward our vision, we will provide community members

and our peers with resources about how to stay healthy using prevention practices we

suggest:

• Develop a prevention education pamphlet on various health issues, such as

smoking, obesity, diabetes, etc. and distribute them in neighborhoods, churches,

and mail boxes.

• Partner with local clinics and other health-related agencies to increase health

promotion around safe sex, ATOD prevention, and obesity prevention on the streets

of Oakland.

• Host a health fair at the schools to promote prevention practices around sex, ATOD,

and obesity.

• Start a social network blog or group that discusses preventative health care

practices, and sites resources for these practices in the community.


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Finding Youth in Oakland believe that

discussing mental health issues

with their families is not done,

leads to conflict, or is not

supported in the household.

Sub-Finding Family communication about youth to adult transition subjects is non-existent and/or

poses more severe mental health issues or consequences.

Supporting Data: We only added one mental health question to the survey because when we were

building the survey, mental health didn’t seem like that big of an issue, but when the

people answered the question, and when we spoke with our friends, we realized that the

lack of knowledge behind the issue was a problem and needed to see the light of day.

This is why we decided that mental health should be one of our findings.

• 95% of those surveyed said they would take their mentally stressed family member to

a hospital as opposed to dealing with the issue at home.

Mental Health


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• According to the data, when those surveyed were asked where they would take

them if one of their family members was to fall mentally ill, all of them said mental

health clinics around the area. Leading us to believe that discussing issues within

families is a problem.

• When asked what he or she would do with a family member who was mentally ill,

every person who answered said they would take him or her to a hospital or a

mental hospital, and not one single person who answered the question said they

would talk to a family member.

• “ I think we first started focusing on the mental health topic because we realized

how hard it was for upset students to talk to other about their problems. There were

a lot of fights at school, and we sat down and tried to figure out what the real

problem behind the fights were. We decided that the lack of communication

between students and their peers or family members regarding their issues was the

real reason. The lack of support for these problems was what was causing the fights

in the first place.”-Maria

• You can’t talk to your parents, and sometimes you can’t even talk to your friends

about your problems. There needs to be someone you can go to for help before all

the anger and stress builds inside you to a point where you can’t even behave

correctly around people.”-Maria, Youth Health Ambassador

Our Vision We want to create a peaceful space in the back of school next to nature where we

can have discussions. Our ideal dream would be to put these spaces within our

community gardens so that we can see our beautiful gardens as we have open

discussions about our issues.

Recommendations • There will be a group that would meet every week, they would go to the space,

and act like a support group for students who felt they needed to talk to someone

about their problems. All information talked about would be kept confidential, and


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the students will be able to talk to their peers about solutions to their problems.

• Also, along with the support group, we want to start to implement a conflict

resolution team at school. The team would be students who were trained to solve

conflicts between other students. We want to be able to get the students to resolve

their own problems between each other rather than rely on an adult to solve the

conflict.

Finding Racism is causing violence in Oakland

schools and neighborhoods.

Sub-Finding There is a lack of cultural education

amongst various ethnicities in Oakland

schools and neighborhoods. This leads

to violence and not feeling safe in our communities.

Supporting Data: • When those surveyed were asked if they would want to learn more about cultural

education, 83.5% said that they would.

• When those surveyed were asked if they believed that race matters, over 50%

answered saying yes, they believed that race does matter.

Cultural Education


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• When asked what they felt was an important issue in their community, one survey

participant answered, “lack of self knowledge, lack of a sense of the legacy of

struggle…” -Eden (Teacher at Eastside Arts Alliance)

• When asked what they felt was one thing they could do to improve their

community, one survey participant answered, “if I had a way to organize something

fun, I would take a bunch of people from different communities and put them

together, imagine the relationships and the bonds that could be put together.” -

Anonymous student in Oakland

• “If you want to know where you came from, you need to go back.” –Janelle

(Student at Youth Empowerment School)

Our Vision We envision Oakland schools and neighborhoods will be more informed of other

cultures, as well as, celebrate and educate a different culture every month other than

African and Xicana history.

Recommendations: In order to increase cultural education in our schools we suggest:

• Having cultural assemblies on multiple cultures and ethnicities other than African

and Xicana history.

• We will work with partners and our schools in Oakland to advocate for ethnic studies

classes to be a part of the curriculum, we will lend support to those organizations.

• We will have guest speakers from other cultures who currently experience or have

experienced racism and segregation to motivate young people; we will host a

series of talks.

• Hosting a silent challenge day where students can share a secret in their life with

one another without using spoken words. We will devote a day where we will let the

students draw or write down one thing they want to anonymously share with other

students. They will post what they want to share on a wall for everyone to view. A

professional mental health provider will conduct a debriefing.


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We decided after much deliberation, that the easiest way to bring cultural awareness

to the community and school would be to include it in the school setting, and have it be a

celebration rather than a lecture.

We want to have cultural assemblies every month, and invite members from the

community to join us as well. Every month will highlight a different culture, and allow

everyone to participate with the culture’s native customs, questions, and culture. It will

allow them to learn about someone else while learning a little about themselves in the

process.

Limitations and Lessons Learned We learned a lot about research, and data collection through this project. We as

youth had never come across things like survey monkey before, or how to organize a

survey. With the help of our adult allies, we were able to learn how to put together a

survey, and also, we were able to learn how to do a successful and professional focus

group. We also learned that not all the data you collect in a survey is useful data. We only

needed to use the data that connected back to our research question, and in the end,

we were able to create some very strong findings from the data.

Throughout this research process there were areas where we could have made

improvements and methods we could have used differently. For example, we could have

widened our target population to a more diverse group of people and use a larger

sample size during the surveying process. Also, just being able to reach more people with

the surveys we collected would have been useful, because then that would have allowed

us to get a greater variety of people, and just more data in general. If we would have


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been able to collect the necessary data needed, feel like our findings would have been

able to become a little more structurally sound. We felt like trying to put together a great

amount of focus groups, was a little stressful, and when we tried, there were always

people who had previously confirmed, but then had dropped out last minute, leaving us

with no focus group.

Also, the time limit of two months that we had to collect the data, and organize it was

a little time constraining. If we had more time to gather more data, we would have been

able to go through the research and locate some more findings. We also felt having some

interviews with liquor store owners, teachers, and policy makers; as well as including more

pictures would have been a good thing to include in our final report.

Next Steps and Actions The Youth Ambassadors will be hosting their Youth Health Summit (YHS) in

December. The YHS will allow them to discuss their findings, and talk about their next steps

for the project. We will recruit more young people to be involved in our action plans.

We need to choose one or two of our recommendations and create a campaign

around some of our main findings. We plan to start to figure our how we can get those

goals met, and really start to strategize on how we are going to get funding for the

projects we want to implement.

We need to figure out how, after the project is done, we could possibly make the

Ambassadors a more permanent team, so that they could in return, teach other students

about how they got their goals accomplished in this project. We want to become youth

health educators and trainers for more youth.


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We will be creating our master plan for the next three months or so, figuring out

what our next big goals are for the action projects, and more ways to promote our work.

Meet the Oakland DONS... Maria Cuaya

Hello! My name is Maria Cuaya, and I’m a senior at Youth Empowerment

School! I chose to join this project because I wanted to create change in

my community and leave something for the students who go to my school

after me. I like to play soccer, and I’m going to play it professionally when I

get out of high school! Senior baby! CLASS OF 2011!!!!

Bella Montoya

What’s up! My name is Bella Montoya, and I’m a Junior at Youth

Empowerment School! I wanted to be in Youth Building Healthy

Communities because I wanted to create a healthy school for my fellow

students. I wanted to be able to have a school with healthy food, and a

healthy environment. I just want my school to be a safe healthy place to

come to everyday.

David Lara

Hey People! My name is David Lara, and I’m a Youth Health Ambassador

also known as the Oak Town Don’s. I’m a freshman at Youth Empowerment

School and I think it’s important to have healthy food at my school. We

need healthier foods for lunch and less fighting at school. YBHC lets me

work with my friends and make change at our school, that’s why I do it!

Yadira Arrevolos

Hello! My name is Yadira Arrevolos and I go to Youth Empowerment

School. I’m a sophomore, and I joined Youth Building Healthy Communities

because I wanted to create healthy changes for my school. I want to start

eating healthy in our cafeteria, and I want there to be more cultural

education for our students. I like to draw, and I love my family and my

boyfriend very much.


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Alejandro Martinez

Hey what’s up! My name is Alejandro Martinez, and I’m a Sophomore at

Youth Empowerment School in Oakland, CA. I can be kind of shy, but I

love my friends, family and girlfriend very much. When you get to know

me, I’m the life of the party. I joined YBHC because I was concerned

about cultural education at my school. I wanted to make a change, and

that’s why I’m a youth Health Ambassador.

Fortino Vasquez

What’s up People! My name is Fortino Vasquez and I’m a Senior at

Youth Empowerment School! I’m a youth organizer, and have been a

youth organizer since my Freshman year of high school, and I will

continue on after graduation. I want to go to college at UC Santa

Cruz, and I am one of the most ambitious people you will ever meet. I

can always bring a smile to any one's face.

Mary Tuinauvai

Hey everyone! My name is Mary Tuinauvai and I currently attend City

College of San Francisco. I am a Dance Major with a Minor in Kinesiology.

I am honored to have been apart of YBHC because I feel it is an effective

way to have my voice heard as an advocate for social justice for our

youth and our communities, local as well as global. As a youth health

blogger, I am excited to have the ability to outreach, influence and

impact change for the better while attracting an audience who share my

concerns. I have been working around social justice issues for two years and have been

involved in multiple organizations that focus on specific social justice issues, such as

violence prevention and community justice.

Jessica Gonzales

Hello, my name is Jessica Gonzales, and I’m a sophomore at San

Francisco State University. I’ve been organizing since my Junior year of

high school, and ever since then it has become a passion. I really love my

family and I love to make people laugh. I joined YBHC because I felt that

after growing up in the Oakland School District, changes needed to be

made to the schools regarding health, and health issues in our

community. I had the opportunity to work with the best team and

organizer could ever ask for, and the changes that we’re going to bring to our schools are

going to go down in history. We are the movement. We are the change.

Special thanks to the Kresge Foundations for the financial support for this project!

Oakland Dons Final Report

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Transcript of Oakland Dons Final Report