Overview

The Goal of New Routes to Community Health is to improve the lives of new immigrants through media created for and by immigrants.

New Routes to Community Health is a new approach for improving the health of immigrants in the United States through immigrant-created media. New Routes has provided grants to eight diverse immigrant-led collaborations across the United States. Media include television and radio features, telenovelas, live theater and internet and social marketing campaigns. These locally-focused media and outreach campaigns are to give voice to immigrant health needs.

Grants were given to collaborations in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis/St Paul, Oakland, Philadelphia and San Francisco. Projects include telenovelas to provide information about treating mental health issues in Boston’s Haitian community, a social marketing campaign to improve the working conditions of domestic workers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and instructive DVD vignettes to help Chinese elderly navigate the health care system in Los Angeles.

New Routes, a project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Benton Foundation, and MasComm Associates, is funded through December 2010.

The New Routes Model
New Routes partnerships bring together media-makers, immigrant organizations, and community institutions to improve the health and well-being of immigrants. These partnerships create media and community engagement initiatives that build leadership and promote integration as a reciprocal process that benefits immigrants and the larger community. 

All New Routes grantees: 

• Create media – local media, multi-media and new media – as a powerful tool for immigrants to use in improving the health of immigrants and in calling attention to their health care needs.

• Forge partnerships among immigrants, local media makers and established community institutions to address community health concerns.

• Build the skills of immigrant leaders to communicate with immigrants and the larger community about community health issues.

• Promote immigrant integration as a reciprocal process that benefits immigrants and the larger community.

• Reinforce founding American values, including the right to free speech, equity and opportunity for all.

Why Focus on Immigrant Health?
Just over 1 million newly documented and undocumented immigrants and refugees arrive in the United States each year. New immigrants now make up 12.5% of the total U.S. population and represent approximately two-thirds of the population growth between 1990 and 2000.

The majority of newcomers leave precarious economic or political conditions in their homelands, and face great expense both financially and personally to relocate to the U.S. Once here, already vulnerable immigrants often face fear, anger, and prejudice in their new communities.

Programs that promote the health and well-being of immigrants are essential to helping immigrants achieve self-sufficiency and become valued members of their broader communities. Yet they face enormous obstacles accessing health care services, finding adequate housing, and securing good jobs.

• Many immigrants are employed in low-wage service jobs unlikely to offer health benefits. They are twice as likely to live in poverty and almost three times as likely to not have health insurance as natives.

• Some immigrants have limited knowledge of English, and their cultural customs and attitudes about illness and medicine may vary from those of most Americans.

• Among the barriers that prevent immigrants from seeking care for themselves and their U.S.-born children are limited information about accessing this country’s health care system and fears related to their legal status in the U.S.

As immigrants continue to play important social, cultural, and economic roles in the U.S., receiving communities and immigrants must work together to create opportunities that promote healthy, vibrant communities.

Over the past decade, receiving communities have modeled a wide range of programs that allow for a reciprocal process of integration and understanding between new immigrants and their receiving communities. New Routes seeks to foster more collaborative, community-building programs using local media as a tool.

Why First-Voice, Why Media?
Real two-way communication is at the root of understanding, problem-solving, and empowerment. The ability to hear and tell stories from a firsthand, first-voice perspective is an important media strategy. Focus groups conducted by RWJF in 2004 and 2005 looked at opportunities to improve immigrant health outcomes. They interviewed immigrants and direct service providers about issues related to health care, education, legal rights, employment, and housing. Immigrants confirmed that knowledge of the resources available to them was minimal; service providers expressed frustration with their inability to reach immigrants.

Immigrants in the focus groups said they craved information that could help them adjust to their new communities, but often find mainstream U.S. media impenetrable both linguistically and culturally. They explained that information would be more valuable if communicated through channels used and trusted by immigrants, including:

• family and friends
• in-language media
• word of mouth, stories, and personal connections
• religious leaders

New Routes to Community Health harnesses the power of emerging media and cultural trends to help immigrants and receiving communities work together to improve the social and economic health of immigrants.

About the New Routes Website
The New Routes website is an online community of those committed to improving the lives of immigrants by using media.

The website highlights best practices, offers a showcase for locally created, immigrant related media, and is used to help build the capacity of partners to use new media and online technologies to improve their communities.

Definitions
We use the term immigrant to include all foreign-born newcomers to the U.S. and their children, regardless of their immigration or citizenship status. We include refugees and mixed status families in our definition, but do not include second-generation adults.

We use the term “integration” as defined by Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees as a “dynamic, two-way process in which newcomers and the receiving society work together to build secure, vibrant, cohesive communities.”

We use the phrase “Founding American Values” to refer to the rights codified in the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights. In particular, New Routes is an expression of our First Amendment Rights, offered to all who reside in the United States, without regard to immigration or citizenship status.