The Rural Women's Health Project 2006 Annual Report

2006 Highlights

This year, the RWHP partnership with the Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center has blossomed and we have completed our ¡Vivir a todo pulmón! Needs Assessment, focusing on Tuberculosis and the Spanish-speaking, Foreign-born.  Working with our partners in Florida and Kentucky, surveys and Community Education Sessions (CES) resulted in an incredible series of recommendation to serve clinicians and community members in efforts to curb TB.   An awareness campaign, new education materials, a New Year’s kick-off calendar along with plans for many new materials have been accomplished this year.

Additionally, the Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center, asked the RWHP to partner with them on a pre-assessment focused on TB and rural, US-born African Americans.  This pre assessment has included Community Education Sessions and targeted interviews with community leaders, health providers and professionals.  The RWHP added new staff to take on all of this year’s new projects. 

Project Claridad did some new work this year.  With youth having presented successfully at the Annual East Coast Migrant Stream Forum in St Petersburg, FL and at the Regional Keeping with the Pace/HIV Prevention Conference in Central Florida, the youth went to Northern Florida to present at the statewide Florida Sexual Violence Conference on their work dealing with around relationship violence.

The RWHP facilitated two “Building HIV Prevention” workshops training other non-profits in the techniques and approaches developed over the previous two years.  Over 20 organizations benefited from the ½ day intensive workshops.  With wonderful venues such as the **National Minority AIDS Conference in Hollywood, FL and the ** Annual East Coast Migrant Stream Forum in South Carolina, the RWHP was able to successfully reach those working on HIV with Spanish-speaking, farmworker youth.  Many new alliances were made at these trainings!

Claridad has also stretched into a new community this year, with a new group starting up in the Levy/Alachua County area through our new relationship the Migrant Education office.  In a combined workshop with Crescent City, 12 new youth began their training towards becoming peer educators.

New this year, the RWHP received one of only five awards from the Florida Breast Cancer Coalition Research Foundation to focus on breast cancer education in the Hispanic, rural communities of Florida.  Working with lay-health worker programs in Bradenton, FL (Healthy Start of Manatee County) and the Alianza de Mujeres Activas [AMA] of Pierson, we began the project with participants carrying our an in-depth Breast Health survey.  Almost 200 surveys were gathered, offering us and the partners incredible information to guide us in our community education! 

This was so successful and so necessary, that we decided to go beyond the original plan for this project and include the lay-health workers of the North Central Kentucky AHEC Program! An additional 100 surveys were gathered.  From the combined results, the RWHP developed two fotonovela stories of encouragement and the modeling of the Breast Self-Exam.  The fotonovela stories were prepared in both Florida and Kentucky communities!

Two new fotonovelas were produced with the Redlands Christian Migrant Association.  Focusing on the needs of African-American parents, Sharing Our Triumphs and Positive Discipline with Love were photographed on location at the Crescent City RCMA Center.  Parents and staff did an awesome job in portraying these two stories.  Next year we hope to shoot two new stories with staff and parents from the Lake Placid, FL RCMA Center.