GIS for Community Health

GIS for Community Health is an initiative that has been developed in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing and CDLS, as a collaborative effort focused on integrating community-based participatory research, aiming to prioritize values-based science, research justice, and the benefit of communities.

Participants of GIS for Community Health — Promotoras (community health promoters), post-baccalaureate students, and high school students — create maps based on issues or problems they are passionate about, and present their maps to other organizations, schools, and conferences in hopes of shedding light on the issues we face in our own communities. CDLS Climate Resilience Fellows provide lessons in QGIS to empower participants to address their questions with geospatial data.

Two cohorts of students have completed the GIS for Community Health program. The program incorporates collaboration among Promotoras (community health promoters), youth, and academics to tackle air pollution, health impacts, climate change concerns, and science education. It includes efforts to ban oil drilling in sensitive areas, enhance community-university relations, further climate justice, and combat environmental racism.

Participants have presented their work at the 2023 and 2024 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C., and World Climate Research Programme, in Kigali, Rwanda.