Health Education and Promotion/Salud es Vida

Casa Of Maryland, Inc., Takoma Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): CASA of Maryland's Health Education and Promotion program, Salud es Vida, addresses the need to reduce the transmission of HIV, cancer, tobacco use, and other deadly diseases among adult Latinos and Latinas in suburban Maryland through the use of culturally and linguistically competent strategies. The mission of Salud es Vida is to design, implement, and evaluate a community-based Education and Health Promotion program capable of being replicated among other organizations dealing with at risk Latino adult men and women immigrants with low levels of formal education. CASA seeks funding to promote Internet access and maximize its potential use by the peer educators (promoters) who are the key participants in CASA's Salud es Vida program. By providing Internet access to these peer educators and their staff supervisors, the following aims will be met: 1) Salud es Vida promoters will have access to the Internet through the use of CASA of Maryland's computer lab; 2) Promoters, working with Project Supervisors and technical consultants, will gain skills in accessing Spanish language health education and promotion resources on the Web, including but not limited to information on diseases, information on disease prevention techniques, information on the projects target population, information on peer groups throughout the United States and their countries of origin, and information on popular education methodology; 3) Through Internet connection in each of CASA of Maryland's offices, promoters significantly increase the effectiveness of the project's goals, such as conducting outreach and providing referrals in association with each of CASA's program work in the low-income Latino community; 4) Promoters will gain access to networking capabilities with other community based organizations in order to share information, strategies, successes, challenges, and ideas to improve their work in the low-income Latino community, and 5) Salud es Vida's recently developed peer education HIV/AIDS prevention curriculum, based in popular education methodology, will be disseminated, tested and evaluated by peer groups throughout the country.