Mobilizing the Community for Better Health: What the Rest of America Can Learn from Northern Manhattan
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Mobilizing the Community for Better Health: What the Rest of America Can Learn from Northern Manhattan

Mobilizing the Community for Better Health: What the Rest of America Can Learn from Northern Manhattan

Overview

Mobilizing the Community for Better Health: What the Rest of America Can Learn from Northern Manhattan by Allan Formicola

From 1999 to 2009, The Northern Manhattan Community Voices Collaborative put Columbia University and its Medical Center in touch with surrounding community organizations and churches to facilitate access to primary care, nutritional improvement, and smoking cessation, and to broker innovative ways to access healthcare and other social services. This unlikely partnership and the relationships it forged reaffirms the wisdom of joining "town and gown" to improve a community's well-being.

Staff members of participating organizations have coauthored this volume, which shares the successes, failures, and obstacles of implementing a vast community health program. A representative of Alianza Dominicana, for example, one of the country's largest groups settling new immigrants, speaks to the value of community-based organizations in ridding a neighborhood of crime, facilitating access to health insurance, and navigating the healthcare system. The editors outline the beginnings and infrastructure of the collaboration and the relationship between leaders that fueled positive outcomes. Their portrait demonstrates how grassroots solutions can create productive dialogues that help resolve difficult issues.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780231151672
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publication date: 11/02/2010
Pages: 320
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Allan J. Formicola is dean emeritus of the Columbia University College of Dental Medicine and founder of the university's Center for Community Health Partnerships, which has now merged with the Center for Family and Community Medicine. Over the past two decades, he and his colleagues have developed far reaching programs to improve general and oral health care for underserved communities.

Lourdes Hernandez-Cordero is an assistant professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. She directs the Center for Youth Violence Prevention's CLIMB (City Life is Moving Bodies) project, which works with northern Manhattan-based organizations to promote youth development, physical activity, stewardship, and social capital through community mobilization.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
List of Tables
Foreword by Gail Christopher
Acknowledgments
Part I: Beginnings
Introduction: The Northern Manhattan Community Voices Collaborative
Allan J. Formicola and Lourdes Hernández-Cordero
1. Creating the Collaborative Foundation
Allan J. Formicola, Moisés Pérez, and James McIntosh
2. The Collaborative Structure and the Challenges We Faced
Sandra Harris
Part II: Promoting Health and Primary Care
3. Community Health Workers: A Successful Strategy for Restoring the Health of a Community
Moisés Pérez, Jacqueline Martínez, and Laura Frye
4. Asthma Basics for Children (ABC): Building an Asthma Support System from the Ground Up
Sally E. Findley with Gloria Thomas, Rosa Madera-Reese, María Lizardo, Mario Drummonds, and Benjamin Ortiz
5. Start Right Coalition: Building on Community Initiatives for Childhood Immunization Promotion
Sally E. Findley with Martha Sánchez, Miriam Mejía, Mario Drummonds, and Matilde Irigoyen
6. The Legacy Smoking-Cessation Project
Cheryl Ragonesi, Martin Ovalles, and Daniel F. Seidman
Part III: Strengthening the Safety Net
7. Salud a Su Alcance (SASA): Health Within Your Reach
Anita Lee
8. Health Information Tool for Empowerment (HITE): Making Health Care Resources a Mouse Click Away
Yisel Alonzo
9. HealthGap and the NMCVC's Effort to Cover the Uninsured
Harris K. (Ken) Lampert
10. Healthy Choices: Mobilizing Community Assets to Combat the Twin Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes
Jacqueline Martínez and Yisel Alonzo
Part IV: Providing Dental and Mental Health Care
11. Columbia Community DentCare Program
Stephen Marshall, David Albert, and Dennis Mitchell
12. Mental Health Policy Paper: Giving Voice to a Neglected Epidemic
Lourdes Hernández-Cordero
13. The Thelma C. Davidson Adair Medical/Dental Center
Allan J. Formicola
Part V: Summing Up and Scaling Up
14. Summing Up
Allan J. Formicola and Lourdes Hernández-Cordero
15. Scaling Up
Lourdes Hernández-Cordero, Susan Sturm, Kathleen Klink, and Allan J. Formicola
Epilogue
Acronyms Used in the Book
List of Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Steven A. Schroeder

The story of the Northern Manhattan Community Voices Collaborative contains lessons for health practitioners, public policy experts, and all who care about the health of underserved communities. The ambitions of the project were huge, and not everything worked as planned or was sustained after initial funding expired. Yet the vision of Community Voices, with all its preventive and treatment components, represents the best of American health care. The lessons shared should be of value to all who wish to improve the health of the public.

David Satcher

As we move to reform our health system, lessons from the Northern Manhattan Community Voices Program will be invaluable-lessons in collaboration, partnership, mutual respect, and learning.

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