Abstract
Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. —Henry David Thoreau, Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau
It’s spring in the northern hemisphere, where Health Promotion Practice (HPP) is published. Our yearlong celebration of “20 Years of HPP” continues with presentation of our May issue, announcement of our 2019 Paper of the Year, and publication of two more open access articles in Spanish. A journal for health promotion practitioners? Twenty years ago, that was some convincing seed!
The May 2020 Issue
This issue is full of wonders—16 articles from practitioners, scholars, and new professionals; across diverse settings, using traditional and new methodologies, from assessment through evaluation. The authors find promise in community strengths and explore strategies to address challenges across social–ecological levels. Individually, they advance knowledge for practice; as a set, they remind us of the power and potential of our field.
We have offerings from each of our departments—Practice Notes, Career Development, and Resources, Frameworks, and Perspectives—addressing topics that range from culinary education to digital storytelling to young professionals’ experiences of “sharing one’s story.” Research articles present new tools for addressing community food insecurity, including data visualization, a novel sales tracking measure for corner store interventions, and a new way to assess the nutrition environment of tribal convenience stores. A group of articles titled “Centering Culture in Health Promotion” introduces practical strategies for working with Latinos in low-income communities, respectfully assessing health promotion needs of Latinx farmworker communities, evaluating culture camps for Alaska Native youth, and understanding pastors’ perceptions of the role of the Black church in teen pregnancy prevention. Our final section presents articles that address “Why we do what we do,” looking at attitudes, awareness, motivators, and barriers to health promoting behavior, primary care, and policy adoption. As always, there is so much to share.
The Health Promotion Practice 2019 Paper of The Year: The Sarah Mazelis Award
HPP is proud to announce that “The CHAMPIONS NETWork: Training Chicago high school students as health advocates to improve health equity in their communities” (Heinert et al., 2019) has been selected as our 2019 Paper of the Year, recipient of the Sarah Mazelis Award. Dr. Sara Wieseneck Heinert, University of Chicago at Illinois, led the author team that included Marina Del Rios, Arjun Arya, Ramin Amirsoltani, Nasseef Quasim, Lisa Gehm, Natalia Suarez, and Terry Vanden Hoek. Their article describes the intentional design and implementation of the CHAMPIONS NETWork, a model workforce training program designed to empower underserved youth to improve population health in their own families, neighborhoods, and communities while also exposing them to career pathways in health care.
By engaging students to become part of the health care team, the CHAMPIONS NETWork can improve the health of Chicago’s most underserved communities while empowering students in a novel way and building a pathway that equips them to join the health care workforce. (Heinert et al., 2019, p. 59)
In making this award, our Editorial Board recognized the cultural humility needed to bridge the diverse worlds of adolescents and the health care system, as well as the complexity of engaging young people as change agents of unjust systems of power that directly impact their lives and their communities. In accessible language, supported by program documents and data, the article offers a scalable and sustainable community–academic–hospital partnership model to address health equity and gaps in health care capacity, while nurturing hope and agency among their young collaborators. This is HPP at its best.
The CHAMPIONS NETWork article now joins all of HPP’s Papers of the Year, permanently open access, on the Journal website: http://bit.ly/2UuYpGg. Check them out—it’s quite a collection!
Iceland, Chile, and HPP en Español
Our January 2020 issue featured two open access articles describing the development and implementation of the Icelandic model for adolescent substance use prevention. While the research team has published numerous articles on the model in other journals, we were eager to publish the pair of articles that detail the model’s guiding principles and key implementation considerations.
The Icelandic story is remarkable. I was fortunate to be in Iceland at various points in its “discovery”—the after-the-fact articulation of an intervention so seamlessly integrated in everyday life that, while most people I met, including many at the university, spoke warmly and knowingly of its core elements, they did not identify it until later as an intentional and substantive social change effort. How was that possible?, I wondered.
Over repeated visits, I came to understand the power of Icelandic confidence that the keys to health lie in their culture and within their communities, and the possibilities of “small society” politics where everybody knows everybody—or someone who does. Researchers’ swift recognition of a patterned change in substance use led to community, organizational, and policy changes based on Icelandic values and scientific understanding of risk and protective factors. Using data to explore and illuminate lived experience, this group of bold and determined Icelanders and friends artfully and effectively transformed private troubles into actionable public issues (Mills, 1959). They produced wondrous things.
Over the past 15 years, the Icelandic Prevention Model has been engaged by over 100 communities in 28 countries worldwide. One of the most ambitious projects, Elige Vivir Sin Drogas, was initiated in 2019 in 50 Chilean municipalities, with plans to expand throughout the country in the year ahead. Publishing the Icelandic articles only in English seemed a fixable barrier to full dissemination and implementation of this important prevention approach. With support from SAGE and SOPHE, and translation by Dr. Humberto Soriano, a member of the Chilean implementation team, HPP is able to publish both articles online, open access, in Spanish.
With the addition of the Icelandic articles to our first Spanish publication, HPP’s 2017 Paper of the Year “Aplicación de la teoría de aprendizaje en el entrenamiento acerca de seguridad y salud para trabajadores inmigrantes en las lecherías” by Patricia Júarez-Carillo et al., we now have an HPP en Español collection. You can find these articles in the Special Collections section of the Journal website https://journals.sagepub.com/home/hpp. We hope that you will share this link with colleagues and organizations that would benefit from accessing these resources in Spanish.
Reinvesting in the Work that Brings the Spring
As our journal has matured over 20 years, our pages, our readership, and our confidence have grown. That’s good, because the darkness of even these spring days cannot be denied. While health promotion commitments require that we defiantly confront increasingly bold, divisive, and dangerous norms in policy and politics, on behalf of our 2020 Editorial Board, I promise that HPP will remain a welcoming spring. We hope that you see that in our publishing choices, our communication, our social media presence, and our unwavering respect for community- and evidence-based practice. Although much has changed in publishing and in health promotion in our first 20 years, we remain true to the conviction that a scholarly journal, rooted in practice, can be a powerful agent of social change. “I am prepared to expect wonders.”
