Capacity Building in the Latino Community: Lessons from the Promotora Project in Eastern North Carolina

Abstract

In June 2009, the Association of Mexicans in North Carolina (AMEXCAN), a leading Latino grassroots organization based in Pitt County, North Carolina, received funding from the Pitt Memorial Hospital Foundation to implement the project "Community Health Advisors Promoting Healthy Nutrition and Physical Activity in the Latino Community" (henceforth the Promotora [Promoter] Project). The goals of the project were to train a group of seven women from the Latino community (henceforth promotoras) to promote healthy nutrition and physical activity and to develop a model of community health outreach relying on the trained promotoras' own natural social networks. The project was designed, implemented, and evaluated through a university-community partnership involving AMEXCAN and university faculty from the Departments of Anthropology and Nutritional Sciences, the College of Nursing, and the School of Social Work, all authors of this paper. Students from these academic units were involved through curricular and non-curricular service learning activities. The project derived from a previous collaboration between AMEXCAN and the anthropology faculty, whose goal was to promote diabetes prevention through a series of informative workshops in local churches.