LOCATION: Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A.

ORGANIZATION TYPE: Education

FOCUS AREA: Children / Families, Education, Environment / Land Use, Food security / Nutrition, Health Care Delivery, Housing / Neighborhoods, Immigration, Income & Wealth, Public Health, Public Policy, Race / Ethnicity, Social Inclusion

HEALTH EQUITY INITIATIVES: A co-founder of the New Mexico Health Equity Working Group, co-founded in Dec. of 2007. The group is attempting to systematically change the New Mexico Department of Health Strategic plan towards a more system upstream approach in its policy based lanaguage and in terms of how it guides the entire state of New Mexico. Also simultaneously, community based groups such as the South Valley Partners of Environmental Justice (e-mail: alcoatl944@gmail.com) are documenting and developing their own community-based media or local documentary that in this case captures the local community footprint of Unnatural Causes framed in the local community dialogue and explaining social determinants using local understanding of the issues, especially as it pertains to the New Mexican/Chicano/a/Latino population of Albuquerque's South Valley community. The South Valley Partners of Environmental Justice goal and as part of the New Mexico Health Equity Working Group Partnership plan is to document the systematic struggles of New Mexican communities in always working to ameliorate the conditions that affect and impact their communities health, using and integrating community based narratives and understanding of living in the ground zero conditions that are impacted adversely by social determinants. But also to identify social determinants that are having a positive impact as well. It's an educational, research, using local community-based policy to inform and change at the local level social determinants.