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Salud America! has received a two-year, $1.5 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to create new digital content to inspire people to drive community change for health for all U.S. families.
Salud America! was established nationally in 2007. The program produces tailored and relevant multimedia research, tools, and stories to fuel its online network—more than 200,000 moms and dads, healthcare providers, and community and school leaders—to start healthy changes where Latino children and families can better live, learn, work, and play.
The new funding will extend Salud America! from October 2018 to October 2020.
Salud America! now will engage more people with enhanced action and education content. The program also will expand its health focus on healthy neighborhoods (transportation, affordable housing, green spaces) and healthy and cohesion (conditions of poverty, immigrant and rural health, social cohesion).
“We want to help everyone work individually and together to achieve health, ensuring everyone has a fair opportunity to be as healthy as possible,” said Dr. Amelie Ramirez, director of Salud America! and the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio.
Health issues are rampant in the United States.
Some groups suffer from issues with the non-medical drivers of health, such as quality education, support, transportation, healthy food, and more. As a result, they often suffer worse health outcomes than others.
Salud America!’s content aims to fuel action to reduce these challenges.
“Exposure to our content correlates with a higher degree of engagement in [taking] actions at the school, local, state, and national levels,” said Dr. Ramirez, citing recent survey data of network members. “It also increases people’s individual confidence to [speak up] for healthy change.”
Below are key program objectives:
Increase Focus on Key Health Issues
Salud America! has reorganized its website to focus on three themes for health:
Enhance Action and Education Content on Health
Under its three new themes, Salud America! will digitally curate content to fuel healthy change. Emphasis will go to inform grassroots community leaders in rural areas and smaller cities.
Content will include:
- Salud Hero stories and videos of healthy change
- In-progress changes and resources to stir data and ideas for action.
- E-communications and social media outreach on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
- #SaludTues Tweetchats on health issues at 12 p.m. CT on some Tuesdays on Twitter/X.
Create New Action Campaigns
Salud America! will create new campaigns to encourage network members and the public to take action.
Campaigns include opportunities to submit public comments in support of healthy change, partnerships to amplify existing actions, and creating new Action Packs. Action Packs offer model content, templates, information, and technical support to enable people to make a healthy policy or system change in their community or school.
For example, more than 300 school district leaders nationwide have downloaded the Salud America! School Support Action Pack This Pack helps people craft a system to identify and support students who deal with issues at home.
Salud America! also will recruit a panel of local and national consultants to advise on program sustainability and making further impact on health.
“We are dedicated to creating content to connect with and inspire people to get involved and build a healthy nation where everyone can live healthy lives,” Ramirez said.
By The Numbers
44
million
immigrants live in the United States
