Community Projects

We care about the health of our neighbors in New Orleans and in Louisiana, so our faculty, staff, and students are involved in many public health projects in our local community. Some of these projects have a single goal of helping the local community and some are research projects that also are designed to develop or evaluate models for public health programs. Nearly all of them also give opportunities for students to take their classroom skills to the real world while contributing to the health of others.

Here are some examples:

• Acadiana Coalition of Teens against Tobacco (ACTT) is a project to cut smoking in 24 high schools across southern Louisiana. The fundamental approach of ACTT is to change the school environment, such as by reducing or eliminating places where smoking is allowed, making special events smoke-free, and putting posters on the walls of school reminding students of the risks of smoking and the pressures coming from the tobacco industry.
  
• The Schoolyard Project is an NIH-funded research project to study the effect of providing a safe play area on the physical activity of inner-city schoolchildren in New Orleans. The study hypothesis is that in inner cities children do not get enough physical activity simply because their parents do not believe it is safe for them to be outdoors, so they stay inside and watch television. In the intervention school teachers are paid to stay and provide a sense of safety in a schoolyard on weekday afternoons and weekdays, and neighborhood children are free to come and go as they wish. We are measuring how many students play in the schoolyard, what effect this has on their total physical activity and time spent watching television, and what impact it has on their body fat. Student workers are involved in many activities in the project.
  
• Step Together New Orleans is a CDC-funded city-wide project to reduce the burden of obesity, diabetes, and asthma. It includes many activities, ranging from making the city more walkable and bikeable to a media campaign that promotes physical activity and healthy eating to improving the clinical care of adults with diabetes and children with asthma.
  
• Project BRAVE is a project in a troubled neighborhood in New Orleans to reduce teen violence. Teens from this neighborhood are working with a faculty member to identify root causes of violence and bring together community members and leaders to address these causes.
  
• The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Louisiana is the state’s smoking prevention program, implemented by the Louisiana Public Health Institute. This project includes a major statewide media campaign to prevent smoking, advocacy to strengthen clean indoor air laws, programs to promote smoking cessation in public hospitals, and various community-based activities. Faculty members from Community Health Sciences are on the Steering Committee for this project and students are involved in many ways.
  
• Two faculty members are working with the state health department on Surveillance for HIV-related Risk Behavior in New Orleans. This CDC-funded project is designed to track over time the sex- and needle-sharing behavior of injecting drug users, men who have sex with men, and high-risk heterosexuals. These persons are identified and interviewed in person in New Orleans, and the project gives us an opportunity to both help people individually and better understand the context of risk behavior so we can help the entire community.
  
• Promoting Adolescents to Change Children’s Health (PATCCH) is a project taking place in two Early Head Start centers in which faculty, staff, and students are working with teenage mothers and their children to prevent health and social problems in the children when they become teens.
  
• The Mary-Amelia Douglas-Whited Community Women’s Health Education Center is part of the Tulane University/Xavier Center of Excellence in Women’s Health. It is involved in various community health education activities, including Healthy Tales, which uses traditional story-telling techniques to help women learn about health.