Family Health and Food Security
Emplacement
The Los Niños Model
The Los Niños model integrates nutrition, health, and organic agriculture into a community approach that offers program participants self-reliant methods to address their food needs. Los Niños promotoras are trained to work in their own communities disseminating information about these important issues.
The Promotoras
Each promotora teaches two Nutrition & Ecology classes during two 4 month sessions every year. They offer one class for adults, while the other class is taught to elementary school children. Generally there are between 10 and 35 participants in each class.
The promotoras have typically had extremely limited access to education and have dedicated much of their lives to their families. Their work in the Family Health and Food Security programs affords them the respected title of teacher in their communities, and enables them to fulfill a much-needed role outside of the home.
Family Health Outreach
The outreach model for this program has proven to be extremely successful in reaching vast numbers of families in the border region. Last year over 25,000 family members, including adults and children, benefited from heightened awareness of nutrition and ecology issues affecting their lives and their communities.
The Family Health and Food Security Programs are currently in operation in Tijuana and Mexicali, Mexico. Los Niños is looking t to expand the program into underserved communities in the San Diego region.
Beyond providing nutritional education, the training of promotoras is a great solution to provide women with necessary opportunities in career development. Utilizing people who are from the community also creates both buy-in and makes sure the program takes advantage of local knowledge; something that is often missing from other programs. The border population typically has unique needs when compared to those living in other areas and this program seeks to address them.