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Health Education Recipes Document
Health education and promotion are essential strategies for fostering farmworkers’ engagement in their health behavior. Oftentimes, outreach staff addresses the health needs of migrant and seasonal farmworkers through targeted health education. Outreach workers are renowned for their ability to relay valuable health messages to farmworker audiences. Sometimes these educational encounters are specially designed and need significant planning. Other times, they are unstructured, more spontaneous, and occur in situations that require adapting content according to farmworker’s schedules. But because outreach staff practices various health education methods, FHSI developed this chapter to introduce structured health education lessons targeted towards migrant and seasonal farmworker populations.

This chapter offers outreach staff health education recipes and tools for facilitating what FHSI calls outreach centered health education, a concept originally introduced in our Curriculum for Outreach Centered Health Education (COCHE). This type of instructive approach is unique, as it focuses on delivering health education in an outreach context that responds to the health needs of farmworkers. The health education resources and recipes in this chapter can be implemented during a short period of time and within an outreach setting (where farmworkers live, work, and congregate).

The recipes in the following pages provide examples of reliable models for delivering outreach centered health education. Each recipe was designed to provide outreach staff with a set of hands-on, practical tools that can be readily used among diverse farmworker audiences. This chapter contains two primary sections with health education activities:

Quick & Easy Health Education Tools
These Quick and Easy Health Education Tools provide outreach staff with brief activities to last about 5-10 minutes. Each tool serves a purpose, including icebreakers, dividing groups into pairs/teams, evaluation, and incentives. These tools can be used in conjunction with many other health education topics.

The Health Education Recipes
The Health Education Recipes section provides a set of hands-on, practical health education activities to be used among farmworker audiences. This section includes “recipes” that lay-out a series of steps to carry out a 30-60 minute health education session along with Information Sheets that provide useful background information on the topic at hand. The Information Sheets are written for health educators only. These sheets are not a comprehensive summary of all there is to know about the topic; instead, they capture key information relevant to the Health Education Recipes that correspond to that topic.

Each Health Education Recipe is intended to stand alone; however, one, two, three, or more recipes can be delivered in any order and independent of one another. Recipes can be used in conjunction with existing curriculum, but should not be considered a substitute for a comprehensive health education curriculum for the topics addressed in this chapter. Specifically, the Health Education Recipes are organized in the following manner:

Pesticide Exposure

• Health Education Recipe: Body Mapping
• Health Education Recipe: How Do Pesticides Enter the Body?
• Health Education Recipe: Drawing Pesticide Solutions

Heat Stress

• Health Education Recipe: Help a Friend!
• Health Education Recipe: Heat Safety Cards

Diabetes & Obesity

• Health Education Recipe: Physical Activity Paper Ball Game
• Health Education Recipe: Lower Trans Fats
• Health Education Recipe: Portion Control

Stress

• Health Education Recipe: Managing Stress
• Health Education Recipe: Coping with Culture Shock and Displacement

Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs)

• Health Education Recipe: Fruity Fun
• Health Education Recipe: Signature Hunt

Family Communication about Sexuality

• Health Education Recipe: Attitudes and Beliefs
• Health Education Recipe: Talking about Sexuality and Values

Farmworker Health Services, Inc. One of FHSI’s primary purposes for developing this chapter was to equip outreach staff (as well as other health educators) with field-tested educational tools and resources that will encourage farmworkers to take an active role in maintaining their health. FHSI hopes to supplement your current programs with these materials, thereby relaying valuable health information to farmworker populations. After all, our mutual goal is to enable farmworkers to make healthy choices for leading a healthy life.

The contents of this chapter can be tailored to meet the specific needs of your farmworker–serving organization and target population. Should you require additional resources or instruction for using the outreach centered health education recipes outlined in this chapter, FHSI can provide you with information and training on how to deliver recipes included in this chapter. Please contact FHSI directly at: mail@farmworkerhealth.org.