Health Equity

ACEDONE’s goals led to the recent development of a Health Equity division. Ayatt Elawad joined the ACEDONE team as the Director of Health Equity in September 2021.  This led to an evaluation and monitoring of projects crucial to achieving measurable outcomes for eliminating health disparities within the African community in the Greater Boston area. The Department of Health Equity’s main focus currently is working on a community-based project addressing the mental health needs of the community, titled Jenga. From the Kiswahili word ‘Kujenga’ that translates ‘To Build’, the aim of the Jenga project takes a two-fold approach: 

  1. Identify mental health needs of African immigrants within a culturally informed understanding along multiple perspectives: children/youth, parents, families, and community leaders. 

  2. Design and evaluate an innovative, culturally informed case management model, reflecting a strengths perspective that addresses mental health functioning, educational outcomes, and issues of inequity. 

The Health Equity program also works in collaboration with the Equity Now and Beyond coalition, a collaborative of five immigrant-led organizations, to host vaccine clinics and provide educational outreach in immigrant communities across Massachusetts. 

Moreover, the Health Equity program works to partner with a variety of different projects at ACEDONE to provide a lens of understanding of social determinants of health and commitment to health equity.

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Fitness Equity Program

This year, ACEDONE has partnered with Liberty Fitness in Roxbury to discover new ways that we can create more equitable access to physical health and fitness for members of the African community. Immigrants and refugees often exhibit relatively lower rates of physical activity, but often for reasons poorly understood. Cultural and language barriers, gender norms, and competing priorities all fail to promote leisure-time physical activity. Moreover, social support for physical activity is relatively low among immigrant communities.

In order to bridge this gap, we have created a program which distributes reduced price gym memberships to low-income immigrant families. While these memberships are available to all members of this community, we are focusing on supporting women and mothers in particular, who experience these obstacles to physical health to an even greater extent.

As part of this program, memberships will be discounted at just $9/month for black and brown immigrant families of low-income backgrounds. If you are interested in participating in the early stages of this project, please use this link to sign up for a consultation with Liberty Fitness.

Organized and established in 2020, Equity Now & Beyond (EN&B) brings immigrant communities together to address the COVID-19 crisis now and build greater health equity ‘beyond’ the pandemic. EN&B is led by four grassroots immigrant organizations that are led by, serve, organize and engage Latin American, African, Haitian, and Brazilian communities in greater Boston: Brazilian Women’s Group (BWG), African Community Economic Development of New England (ACEDONE), Haitian Americans United (HAU) along with its sister Haitian partner Immigrant Family Services Institute (IFSI) and Agencia ALPHA. Each of these groups is led by nearly 100% Black and brown immigrants at the board, staff, and member levels.

Each group has a 20+ year history of providing services, support, education, advocacy, leadership development, and community outreach and organizing initiatives and programs (e.g., worker rights, after-school programming, immigration counseling and advocacy, community economic development, citizenship classes, etc.).

The primary mission of these organizations includes advocacy and assistance with housing, food security, worker’s rights, immigrant civil rights and economic development, education, and women’s empowerment. These issues are central to the social and infrastructural determinants of health. Additionally, providing relevant additional resources alongside vaccines has added both value and incentive to the vaccine outreach efforts.

Immigrant community-based organizations in Greater Boston have played an important role in COVID response and vaccine rollout during the pandemic by meeting regularly with the city, state, and hospital officials, mobilizing faith-based networks, training immigrant healthcare advocates, and gathering much-needed resources to underserved Black and Brown neighborhoods in the Boston metro area. 

Working together as coalition partners has pooled the social capital and activated broader networks of these organizations to bridge inequities by attracting funding and partnerships with healthcare and government organizations, fostering new relationships, amplifying immigrant community voices to garner attention and resources, and advocating public health and healthcare systems to strengthen the assets of these organizations beyond the pandemic in order to set priorities and develop plans for fostering healthy immigrant communities.

Since the launch of EN&B in early 2021 this collaborative has:

  • Vaccinated over 4,100 community members – those who health care providers could not reach!

  • Produced and distributed an immigrant youth video/PSA on the importance of getting the vaccine – see video here: https://bit.ly/3p6bdSq

  • Educated over 60,000 community members in their native languages on Covid and the vaccine via weekly Facebook Live, WhatsApp, radio & tv

  • Distributed over 4,600 PPE kits

Equity Now & Beyond