Advocates for Justice and Education
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Areas of Technical Assistance
Advocates for Justice and Education Inc. (AJE) seeks to build upon its health equity programming by continuing to increase the capacity of parents to engage in parent-led advocacy efforts together with healthcare professionals to eliminate racial disparities and inequitable access to health care for Black and Latinx children and youth with disabilities and special healthcare needs (CYSHCN) in the District of Columbia living in Wards 1,4, 5, 7, & 8. This phase of the project will focus on 1) Solidifying the development of a parent-led community health advisory panel comprised of parents of CYSHCN and healthcare professionals who service our target community; 2) Strengthening and increasing our parent base and continuing to train and support parents of CYSHCN in their advocacy efforts; 3) Building a strong base of healthcare professionals to collaborate with parents on their identified priority issues; and 4) Bringing together parents and healthcare professionals to co-create solutions, actions and strategies to address parents identified priorities and begin to achieve health equity. The continuation of this project is crucial because families in the identified wards are vulnerable for multiple reasons including documentation status, which impacts access to public benefits such as Medicaid insurance; poverty; race; language; transportation; and educational attainment. Thus these populations have a lower life expectancy, in part because they cannot access adequate healthcare for their children.
Objectives
Our overarching goal for the Health Equity Project is to eliminate barriers to accessing healthcare in DC for Black and Latinx CYSHCN (the target community) through a parent-led agenda in collaboration with key stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem. The principal objectives that will help us achieve this goal in CSHE 2.0 are as follows.
Objective 1: Solidify the development of a parent-led community health advisory panel comprised of parents who have Black and Latinx CYSHCN and healthcare professionals who service our target community.
Objective 2: Strengthen and increase our parent base by tapping into community resources where our target community spends significant time. We will build partnerships with family support programs and organizations where parents, fitting the profile of our target community, spend their time. Strong relationships built on trust are the core of community organizing, so we will also fortify the bond between our parent leaders by centering their voices and creating spaces that foster the creation of friendships. We will also facilitate learning amongst our parent leaders that builds on their communal wealth of knowledge.
Objective 3: Develop a strong base of healthcare professionals who will work with parents
of our target community in co-creating solutions for an equitable healthcare system. We will accomplish this by building upon AJE’s established partnerships and community relations. The strategy will be to elevate the work we are doing on this Project, the voices and stories of parents, and their target issues, by tapping into the resources within our coalition spaces. We will deepen our relationships and partnerships with individual and organizational members. We will also conduct outreach in our target wards, 1, 5, 7 and 8, with the addition of Ward 4, to identify healthcare providers in these areas. We added Ward 4 because there is a large population of Latinx families living in ward 4. We will also launch a public information campaign on the issues raised by the Community Health Ambassadors so that the DC community, at-large, is aware of the work we are doing, and our goals to affect systemic change in transforming DC’s healthcare system.
Objective 4: Remain grounded in community needs. We will accomplish this goal by collecting stories along the way that demonstrate the far reach of the problems identified by our Community Health Ambassadors. We will use these stories to amplify the needs of families, highlight the successes and strength of families, and highlight continued gaps in improving the delivery of healthcare to our target community.
2. Activities and Deliverables
Our project’s approach for the next two years, activities and related components are as follows:
Deliverable: Solidify a Community Health Advisory Panel (the Panel) comprised of 14 Community Health Ambassadors and 10 healthcare professionals to work in coalition to address the priority issues identified by the Community Health Ambassadors by advancing co-created solutions, actions and strategies.
-Work with the Panel to develop a plan to address priority issues using community organizing principles.
•Convene bi-monthly coalition meetings to discuss logistical solutions to address the priority areas selected by the Community Health Ambassadors.
•Provide the Panel support in implementing plan strategies and approaches.
•Support the Panel in developing approaches to shifting mindsets of DC at-large and call out racism and ableism in the delivery of healthcare in DC through mechanism such as a public inform Build a strong parent base of 14 Community Health Ambassadors who are engaged in systems change advocacy within Washington, D.C. at-large, to decrease barriers to accessing healthcare for Black and Latinx CYSHCN.
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