Community Health Program

Last year the Community for Positive Aging received funding to develop a community health program to reduce health disparities and inequities in our region with an emphasis on reaching Black, Brown and indigenous older adults of color in our community. Providing services and accessible materials in one's language of choice is an essential part of improving access. How we share information can be just as important.

We’ve always leaned heavily on traditional channels of communication that tend to be paper focused— flyers, newsletters, etc. We don’t plan to stop doing that but we also recognize that people access information in different ways and languages. We want to be able to serve and reach communities we haven’t been able to because of language and other barriers.

We began thinking, wouldn't it be great if we could create videos to reach a much larger audience? Video speaks to so many people. What if we created eight to ten short videos on community health in multiple languages that we could show at our senior centers, the residential buildings that we work in, at health fairs, on our social media and broadcasted on public access channels?

We were fortunate to be awarded a grant from Mt. Hood Cable Regulatory Commission to purchase video equipment and provide training to make videos. I put out a request to our volunteers and our staff to create a video training cohort. Starting in January, a group of ten participants from the Center, staff, and volunteer teachers have been meeting on Fridays at MetroEast Community Media to receive training on creating information videos for our community.

For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, closed captioning in all our videos will allow them to understand what is being said. This work is going to improve language access, which is a priority for CFPA. It’s an evolution in the way that we communicate with the public. It's going to open doors for us in terms of how we share our mission and our ability to support more people in our community who might not necessarily be coming to the Center.

The cohort is currently developing content that will be displayed onsite at the Senior Center, in buildings we work at to provide resident services, on cable access and other social media. We are so excited to share more about this project with our community in the coming months.