African-American babies are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday as white babies. Are current prevention efforts enough to close the health gap?
Disparities
The water and sewer pipes that serve the rest of the Coachella Valley stop five miles short of Saint Anthony’s trailer park, home to poor farmworkers and their families. Their sewage is piped into a waste lagoon near the park. And the water comes from a 40-year-old well – water that is tainted with a carcinogenic toxin: naturally-occurring arsenic.
Maternal mortality rates have increased in California and racial disparities persist.
Even as much of California’s housing market has begun to recover, foreclosures and vacant homes continue to plague the South Los Angeles community of Watts.
Casa Dominguez includes a childcare facility, after-school programs, college prep courses, career counseling, computer training and ESL classes, all orchestrated by a services coordinator. But what sets Casa Dominguez apart starts with a health clinic on the community’s grounds operated by St. John’s Well Child and Family Center.
Over the past year, a $25 million program launched in Hayward to turn around a troubled neighborhood.
Latino voters value conservation – so much so that protecting the environment is just as important as improving the economy to this fast growing section of the electorate, a recent survey found.
Nearly every afternoon this summer, Florencia Ramirez drove past the strawberries and lima beans growing in the Oxnard plain, and each time she grew angry about what she saw. In an area plagued with water shortages and droughts, some of the largest agricultural producers in the nation seemed to be using water with abandon, Ramirez observed.
The Great Recession hit black workers the hardest, according to a recent report by The Urban Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research organization.
A year ago, the Select Committee on the Status of Men and Color established by Speaker of the Assembly John Pérez and led by Assemblymen Sandré Swanson (D-Oakland) began efforts to alert the state on the most critical issues facing these young men. The committee wrapped up their year-long effort in Sacramento yesterday.