Website to Support Organizations That Are Working to Reduce Health Inequities and
Create Healthy Neighborhoods
Washington, D.C.—Cinco de Mayo saw the launch the CCHE Puede website, a Spanish-language website to support organizations working to create healthy neighborhoods and to reduce childhood obesity. This website will be a resource for organizations and individuals that are Spanish-speakers and work with Spanish-speaking communities. We believe that to stop the increase in childhood obesity and create healthier neighborhoods we need to communicate with people in the language that they choose to communicate in. To this end, we are addressing the needs of the Spanish-speaking community.
CCHE Puede is inspired by the struggle of farm-workers in the United States. Our goal is that this website becomes a learning community based upon shared values, needs and practices. We also want it to be a space for dialogue for people and organizations committed to the right of our communities to live healthy lives. The site is designed for interaction and the exchange of experiences and information. We also hope to share tools useful in the work to win local public policies that increase the access to healthy foods and safe places to play in our communities.
The childhood obesity epidemic is a very serious problem both in the United States and in Latin-America and the Caribbean with nearly one in three youth in the United States being obese. We celebrate the growing attention being given to the issue, but at the same time we insist that we cannot change the body mass index of our children without changing the place they occupy in
our society.
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In order to be able to achieve the goal of reverting childhood obesity by year 2015 we are going to need a movement capable of confronting the roots of the issue; starting with the historical and structural inequality in access to healthy food and safe places to play.
“Cinco de Mayo seems like a very fitting day to launch this site” said Pancho Argüelles, one of the members of the team that worked on the site, “this holiday was born as an expression of solidarity with the resistance of Mexicans against the French invasion of Mexico in 1862; today the Latino community in the U.S. is under siege by junk food and marketing campaigns that target our children as well as for the anti-immigrant legislation that dramatically affects our human rights and quality of life.”
The first 10 organizations to be funded through CCHE are:
• Inner City Struggle, East Los Angeles, CA.
• Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Oakland, CA.
• People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), San Francisco, CA.
• Padres Unidos, Denver, CO.
• Safe Streets, Strong Communities, New Orleans, LA.
• Indigenous Educational Network of Turtle Island, Bemidji, MN.
• Rocky Boy Health Board, Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, MT.
• Southwest Organizing Project, Albuquerque, NM.
• WE ACT for Environmental Justice, New York City, NY
• Freedom, Inc., Madison, WS.
For additional information about Communities Creating Healthy Environments and the selected organizations, please visit
About Communities Creating Healthy Environments
Communities Creating Healthy Environments is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that sets out to prevent childhood obesity by increasing access to healthy foods and safe places to play in communities of color. The program will advance RWJF’s efforts to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015 by supporting diverse, community-based organizations and federally charted tribal nations in the development and implementation of effective, culturally competent policy initiatives to address the root causes of childhood obesity locally.
About the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on pressing health and health care issues facing our country. As the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, the Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful and timely change. For more information, visit .
