Supporting a Movement for Health and Health Equity: Lessons from Social Movements: Workshop Summary by Alison Mack

Author:Alison Mack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

COMMUNITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND EDUCATION

Karoleen Feng, community development manager for the Mission Economic Development Association (MEDA),1 described MEDA as an organization that for nearly 40 years has worked to achieve economic justice for the low- and moderate-income Latino residents of San Francisco’s Mission District. Over that time, MEDA has grown from its initial focus on small business technical assistance to broad-based asset building, including recent expansion to include education. MEDA, she said, has a history of success in community planning and building cross-sector networks of partners beyond economic development. “We are good at raising funds,” she said, adding that such funding generally benefits the work of partner agencies as well as MEDA.

Since the founding of MEDA, the once predominantly Latino population of the Mission District, which comprises approximately 60,000 people within an area of 20 square blocks, has diversified. Today, according to Feng, 41 percent of Mission residents are Latino, 40 percent white, 12 percent Asian, and 3 percent black; a total of 40 percent of all residents are foreign-born. Median family income in the Mission District is nearly $68,000, but there is significant disparity among its residents, with Asian and white families earning about $85,000 annually as compared with $45,000 for Latino families. Feng noted that, across the United States, the net worth of white families is approximately 18 times that of Latino families.

Feng highlighted information that illustrates the connection between poverty and health in the Mission District:

One-third of students do not have a medical home, with first- and second-graders least likely to have access.

Less than one-quarter of students meet criteria for healthy weight and height for their age.

Fourteen percent of families with children live in poverty; of them, 68 percent are Latino.

More than one-third of Latino adults in San Francisco work in low-wage jobs (paying $10-$15 per hour).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.