Meeting Unmet Needs in HIV Prevention with Farmworkers
Meeting Unmet Needs in HIV Prevention with Farmworkers
Newsletters - Spring 2009 Newsletter
One of Shelley Davis's greatest accomplishments at Farmworker Justice was her development of our HIV/AIDS prevention projects.Through Shelley's hard work and determination, she was able to expand significantly our community health work and address emerging issues, particularly HIV/AIDS in migrant communities. Farmworker Justice now helps community based organizations and health departments reach farmworkers with effective HIV prevention messages by providing trainings, writing curricula for new programs, and developing individualized technical assistance plans. We are the only technical assistance provider sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to do such work whose mission is focused exclusively on farmworkers.
Our role as a community partner in the CDC's HIV/AIDS prevention projects began in 2001. Through our "Lideres Campesinos Por La Salud" program, we worked with local community health groups to train individual farmworkers as lay health care promoters. Once trained, these bilingual promotores de salud help spread information about good HIV risk reduction practices within their communities. We provide the technical assistance and support agencies need and develop educational materials for these programs, such as flip charts for promotores to use while giving demonstrations in the field, evaluation tools, and fotonovelas (short, illustrated booklets about relevant health topics).More recently, our HIV prevention activities have centered around promoting the use of programs that meet the strict requirements of the CDC's DEBI project, a national strategy to improve the quality and effectiveness of HIV prevention programs. We use two of these CDC-approved programs, Popular Opinion Leader (POL) and Mpowerment, with young Latino migrant men who have sex with men but may not identify as gay or bisexual. We also have taken the lead in developing materials for migrant-serving agencies interested in adapting the Community PROMISE model, a CDC-sponsored intervention which bears some resemblance to promotores de salud programs.
Under Shelly's leadership, FJ has been able to reach farmworker communities across the nation with a unique and tailored approach for delivering information on HIV/AIDS prevention. We are devoted to continuing Shelley's legacy of improving HIV/AIDS prevention programs for farmworkers and, with your help, will carry on her important work for many years to come.
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