Contexts and Issues in Family Studies Term Paper

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Contexts and Issues in Family Studies -- Social Services in the Bilingual Community of Fort Worth, Texas

Fort Worth Texas

The Texas Institute for Policy Research has created a community initiative specifically designed to improve the health of the community's members in the community of Fort Worth. The community center is specifically designed to address such issues as poor health amongst the community, difficulties for secondary English speakers to obtain community services, and to beautify the community through landscape projects. The "Heart of Texas" center believes that while all levels of government have a role in addressing health care issues, the Institute believes that solutions for the future of health care must be developed from the "bottom up," community by community. The Institute encourages the development of stakeholder groups to take leadership in their community to pursue a community-health collaborative process. The ongoing facilitation of community collaboratives is an emerging emphasis for the Institute. Without specific community health-promotion centers such as located in Fort Worth, specific community demographic needs, such as childhood obesity and the need for multilingual health education will not be addressed.

The Promotion of Healthy Living

One of the paradoxes of the United States is that obesity is one of the leading contributory causes of the poor heath of the poorest Americans. "Sparing no populations, obesity disproportionately affects minorities and individuals with lower educational and socioeconomic status (SES) (Flegal, Carroll, Ogden, & Johnson, 2002). But although childhood obesity in minority youths has drawn particular media interest in recent years, community-wide rather than individually focused initiatives to change poor eating habits have been lacking until recently in the area of Fort Worth, Texas. The community center there, with funding from the 'Heart of Texas' health intitiative treats the specific social causes of obseity amongst the poor, as well as creates a network of togetherness to create a better future for the next generation.

The need for a community based initiative with a focus on families rather than on a single group, such as children, is critical because obesity is a lifestyle issue in this community, a community with an unstable network of services and support structures that the 'Heart of Texas' Community outreach center in Fort Worth attempts to address.

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To change a child's lifestyle one must change a child's parental and familial eating habits and exercise habits, as well as address socioeconomic factors that constribute to the obesity crisis within a particular community, specifically, in the case of the program "Healthy Weight," that of a bilingual, high-risk area for poverty and obseity run by the center.

One Program in Action

"Healthy Weigh/El Camino Saludable" is only one example of a recent holistic treatment program that deploys a family-focused obesity treatment, prevention and intervention. The program wasvunique in that it is especially designed for low-income, urban community at high risk for obesity and related chronic diseases to the condition of obseity. Thr program targets issues such as a lack of time and space for physical fitness activities in urban areas such as Fort Worth, and the difficulty of planning healthy meals on a budget in an area with poor and expensive public transportation. Program sessions include exercise classes, lessons based on the FDA's Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and family meals with facilitated "table-talks" about how families could apply the program lesson's content in their daily lives and after the program's end. (Dart, et.al, 2005)

This program is of particular importance for poor communities because they are most at risk for suffering the dangers of obesity. Of all racial and ethnic groups, "24% of persons with less than a high school education are obese compared with 19% of those with high school diplomas. Also, women of lower socioeconomic status "are 50% more likely to be obese than those with higher incomes." (Flegal et al., 2002). Specifically targeting minority groups was also deemed to be necessary, not simply because of the fact that the prevalence of obesity is greater among African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans compared to White Americans and….....

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