At the heart of the project’s power is a focus on social justice.

Numerous public health initiatives have attempted over the years, with little success, to engage Latino parents in promoting healthy lifestyles. In the early stages of organizing the Partnership, Healthy Schools Campaign leaders and organizers in West Town and Little Village examined these past efforts and talked frankly about why the messages had not resonated with parents.

Again and again, a similar theme emerged: parents viewed the public health messages—particularly those related to obesity—as an unwelcome attempt to impose another culture’s values on their families. The voices delivering the messages, those of medical staff or university outreach workers, were simply not speaking the parents’ language.

Rather than focusing the Partnership’s messaging solely on health concepts, project organizers decided to focus their messaging on an issue that spoke to parent’s life experiences and community groups’ missions: the need for social justice.

"Talking about these issues in the framework of social justice resonated with parents’ lived experiences of disparity and discrimination," explained Rochelle Davis, Principal Investigator for the Partnership and Founding Executive Director of the Healthy Schools Campaign. "They experience injustice in so many aspects of their lives every day. Talking about health in that framework makes a lot of sense."

A recent community-level study from Sinai Health System shows dramatically higher rates of childhood obesity and asthma in Chicago’s Latino and African-American communities. In West Town, approximately 65 percent of children are overweight or obese. In Little Village, that number is close to 58 percent. (This compares with a national average of 26 percent.) The numbers are similarly disproportionate for asthma, which in West Town affects nearly a third of all children, more than twice the national average.

These rates reflect a huge range of factors, including conditions in the schools. Instead of simply emphasizing that neighborhood children were at risk of disease because of their weight, organizers pointed out that the children lacked access to the healthy food and physical activity that children in other areas of the city had.

Said Little Village organizer Jovita Flores, whose children attend public schools in Little Village: "In the Latino neighborhood in which I live, I see the number of kids who are obese increasing dramatically. I observed in other neighborhoods that they have a healthy lunch with more fruits and vegetables at their schools, and I realized that we don’t have healthy lunch options at our own schools. I also realized that we don’t have much physical activity in our schools, even though schools in other neighborhoods have recess and PE. I knew then I had to get involved."

Flores worked with other project organizers and parent leaders to arrange a bus tour for parents in Little Village and West Town, so they could visit other public schools in the city that offer healthy food and physical activity to students. Nearly 150 parents visited three schools that offered a salad bar in the cafeteria, daily recess, and innovative nutrition education.

"The field trip was a big eye-opener," said Davis. "It’s one thing to talk about disparities and another thing to see first-hand the resources that are available in other schools within the same system. Literally seeing that the things we were talking about could be a reality—things like recess and fresh, healthy food—gave parents a renewed energy to speak up for change. The message was: if this is a reality in other neighborhoods, it can be a reality in my community, too."