HEALTH DISPARITIES
The Sisters of Charity Foundation views health as vital to supporting families, building stable neighborhoods, and reducing poverty. The Foundation seeks to improve our community’s capacity to eliminate health disparities, those health outcomes that are significantly worse for vulnerable populations.
Health disparities result from multiple socio-economic and environmental conditions, including housing, income and job stability, education, and personal behaviors. Aiming at a significant contributor to health disparities, the Foundation commenced an initiative in 2007 to improve health literacy in Cuyahoga County.
Health literacy encompasses an individual’s ability to find, understand, evaluate, and use health information to engage the services needed to make appropriate health decisions and navigate the health care system.
The Foundation is also cultivating strategies designed to reduce health disparities in the
Central Neighborhood of Cleveland, which is experiencing serious challenges such as a high number of uninsured and incidence of chronic disease.
In keeping with our guiding principles of advocacy and empowerment, the Foundation supports health policy organizations as they pursue objectives of promoting or improving government policies that may reduce health disparities.
NEWS
National Nutrition Month
National Nutrition Month® is a nutrition education and information campaign sponsored annually by the American Dietetic Association. The campaign is designed to focus attention on the importance of making informed food choices and developing sound eating and physical activity habits. Initiated in March 1973 as a week-long event, "National Nutrition Week" became a month-long observance in 1980 in response to growing public interest in nutrition. For more information,
visit www.eatright.org/nnm
Building Healthy Communities and the Garden Boyz are featured in Next American City Magazine
The recent attention to urban-agriculture and food-desserts has become a topic of interest and great relevance to our communities. We invite you to read an interesting article entitled: Cleveland’s Comeback – Reimagining the City from the Ground Up. The article highlights one of the Foundation’s grantees under the H.E.A.L. initiative, Building Healthy Communities and its Garden Boyz program. See link for full article:
http://americancity.org/magazine/article/clevelands-comeback
Health Literacy Missouri launches the health literacy website and libraryHealth Literacy Missouri (HLM) is a non-profit corporation based in St. Louis and serving the entire state of Missouri. The mission of MLM is to improve the health of all Missourians while becoming a national leader in health literacy. HLM strives to provide up-to-date information on health literacy. For valuable resources, updates on the latest activity in their demonstration projects, upcoming health literacy events, health news that is understandable by all, and other areas of interest, go to
www.healthliteracymissouri.org