The LASPA Action Grants were established to provide opportunities for students to transform knowledge, passion, and ideas into action; demonstrate creative and effective problem solving; create partnership(s) in the public or private sector; and produce outcomes that make a positive impact.
Students partnered with faculty advisors to submit grant proposals, and the LASPA Center for Leadership steering committee, composed of students, faculty, staff, alumnae, and trustees, narrowed down the submissions to six finalists, and chose two grant recipients. Ultimately, all six proposals were funded through the generosity of trustees, staff, and friends of the College.
Empowering Latina/o Teens with Healthcare Resources
By Julianne Fu ’16
In her hometown of Humboldt County, California, Raquel Selcer ’17 worked with Planned Parenthood to create a peer health educator program that would provide better access to healthcare information to the increasing Latina/o population.
“Humboldt County, where I grew up, is a rural and medically underserved area in California with a significant Latina/o population…and some of the research I had done showed that only 32.7 percent of Latinas/os believed that their health care needs were being met,” explains Selcer.
Although Selcer was a peer health educator in high school, she was not aware of the tremendous lack of health education or statistics such as those she had discovered through the research for her LASPA grant project. Drawing from her personal experiences, Selcer sought to create a series of workshops for Latina/o teens that would provide information on local health organizations and general health topics, such as diabetes, nutrition and physical health, sexual health, and alcohol and other drugs.
To better meet the needs of those who had the least access to healthcare information, Selcer focused specifically on Latina/o teens to empower them with the knowledge and tools to help implement change in their neighborhoods. Through surveys and advertisements in local radio programs and newspapers, Selcer provided convenient workshop times that fit into the teens’ busy school schedules.
“I chose to work with teens because they’re a population I feel connected to and because preliminary conversations with community members revealed that, similar to when I was growing up in Humboldt County, there were very few productive and constructive activities available to teens,” she says.
Meeting with health educators and promotores¾specially trained, Spanish-speaking health outreach workers¾from local clinics like Open Door Community Health Center and Planned Parenthood, Selcer was able to establish workshop times for the community every Monday and Wednesday. For the meetings, materials were prepared in both Spanish and English, and Selcer translated some of the readings, as well.
“The most interesting part for me was discovering what the teens were most interested in learning and finding resources in the community to share with them,” says Selcer. “I got to pass on my skill to the peer health educators but also learn new ways of disseminating information.”
While the LASPA grant funded Selcer’s work over the summer, the workshops she created and the knowledge she passed along to her colleagues continue to improve health education resources for Latina/o teens in Humboldt County today. Through Skype calls with the peer health educators and Latina/o a students from Humboldt State University, Selcer extended her program into the fall so that students could continue to attend workshops throughout the school year.
For more of our LASPA Action Grants series, click here.