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Fostering Youth Leadership to Address Workplace and Community Environmental Health Issues: A University-School-Community Partnership

University of California, Los Angeles, and School of Public Health Community Health Sciences Department in Los Angeles, California

Marianne Brown, MPH

Alejandra Domenzain, MA

Sweat-shop Watch in Los Angeles, California

Many communities of color are disproportionately exposed to workplace and community environmental hazards. This article presents the results of a pilot project designed by a university-school-community partnership to develop youth leadership to confront these exposures. Using a popular empowerment education approach, students applied peer education, research, and organizing skills learned in the classroom to community-based internships in a service-learning model. Evaluation results from pretests and posttests, focus groups, and in-depth interviews demonstrated that students shared what they learned about young workers’ rights and environmental justice with family and friends. They developed a critical analysis of environmental inequities, created a citywide youth coalition that advocates around legal, educational, and environmental issues affecting youth, and implemented campaigns to enforce child labor laws and to prevent school construction on contaminated land. This multifaceted model can serve as an important foundation to develop youth leaders to influence environmental policies in a variety of communities.

Key Words: youth • empowerment • occupational health and safety • environmental justice • partnerships • service learning • teen workers • adolescents • high school students

Health Promotion Practice, Vol. 6, No. 3, 270-285 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1524839904266515


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