Empowering Latino Youth Farmworkers as Youth Health Educators for Occupational Heat-Related Illness Safety Education in Eastern North Carolina

Details

• Personal Author:
  Arcury TA ; Bailey M ; King K ; Kraemer Diaz AE ; Spears CR
• Description:
  Incorporating youth into health education development, implementation, and evaluation processes for occupational health education has great potential. Empowering youth and communities to be a part of their health education serves to increase the utility and long-term impacts of health education initiatives among underserved, vulnerable communities. In rural North Carolina, many youth are working in the fields to provide income for themselves or their families, yet this is extremely dangerous work that can result in serious health issues. This paper describes a Youth Health Educator program (YHE) that provided youth farmworkers between the ages of 10-21 with the opportunity to protect the health and wellbeing of their community and themselves. This program provided youth the opportunity to gain skills in leadership, managing group dynamics, and public speaking, which help to build character as well as a sense of usefulness, belonging, and power. As applied anthropologists engaged in public and occupational health research and co-developers of this program, we were able to understand the daily situation youth farmworkers confront and, simultaneously, provide an avenue of change and advocacy to protect their health and build their personal capacity and leadership. To protect youth from one of the most serious dangers, which is that of over-heating, we joined with a North Carolina community-based organization to create a youth-led intervention to protect youth and adult farmworkers from heat stress. The foremost lesson learned from this program was that farmworker youth were able to master the education program content and provide a quality educational experience that resulted in greater knowledge of heat-related illness among their peers. Second, as applied anthropologists working with and providing interventions for vulnerable populations, we discovered that we must integrate anthropological methods into organizational goals to develop the best strategies for promoting health behavior change as well as fostering empowerment. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Agriculture Education Health Promotion Hot Temperature Occupational Health Safety
• Keywords:
  Agricultural Workers Children Health Promotion Heat Exposure Injury Prevention Intervention Young Workers
• ISSN:
  0888-4552
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Journal Article
• Place as Subject:
  North Carolina ; OSHA Region 3 ; OSHA Region 4 ; OSHA Region 5 ; West Virginia ; Wisconsin
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  38-43
• Volume:
  35
• Issue:
  3
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20058670
• Citation:
  Pract Anthropol 2013 Summer; 35(3):38-43
• Email:
  cspears@wakehealth.edu
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2013
• Performing Organization:
  Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20080930
• Source Full Name:
  Practicing Anthropology
• End Date:
  20250929
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:db5d4ce6dcb38a32f0df4b606c9ecc539734c3740ffdc03cec90f1e08fdbc2aa482ad60d29e64a96f1c9b573f3a1caddfe4f36630fd2c9c4f9cc1bec927e2e57
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/221707/cdc_221707_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 810.10 KB ]