Communities of color creating healthy environments to combat childhood obesity

Ethnic and racial health disparities present an enduring challenge to community-based health promotion, which rarely targets their underlying population-level determinants (e.g., poverty, food insecurity, health care inequity). We present a novel 3-lens prescription for using community organizing to treat these determinants in communities of color based on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Communities Creating Healthy Environments initiative, the first national project to combat childhood obesity in communities of color using community organizing strategies. The lenses-Social Justice, Culture-Place, and Organizational Capacity-Organizing Approach-assist health professional-community partnerships in planning and evaluating community organizing-based health promotion programs. These programs activate community stakeholders to alter their community's disease-causing, population-level determinants through grassroots policy advocacy, potentially reducing health disparities affecting communities of color.