Poster Presentations (Group I)

The 50 Eliminating Health Disparities Initiative (EHDI) grantees from Minnesota are using innovative approaches and strategies for recruitment, health education, and health care navigation and support to effectively reach their targeted populations. These program strategies evolved through a combination of grass-roots, community-involved program development, data-based decision-making, and modeling on other successful programs. What makes them innovative is the way they use key institutions, family systems, and other traditional values, beliefs, and practices in combination with more conventional organizational strategies in implementing their programs. For example, service accessibility is increased through linguistically appropriate services and materials, by hiring staff that reflects the community,  and by building and maintaining trusting relationships in every client encounter. The poster will list some exemplary program practices that have been generated through this initiative, with particular focus on how grantees build on their cultural strengths to reach and engage their community members and to encourage positive change at the individual, family and institutional levels. It will also provide examples of some programmatic results achieved, and examples of how the programs have shown leadership on health issues, formed innovative partnerships to leverage their activities and funds, and created positive systems changes. Lessons can be learned from the EHDI grantees and how they engage community members and implement programs based on their communities’ cultural strengths and assets in order to produce targeted results, something with which mainstream health service providers and public health entities have had limited success.