Watts Rising: A Vision for a Healthier Watts

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ABSTRACT Watts is a community in Southeast Los Angeles that has faced systematic disinvestment, discrimination, and resource deprivation, resulting in health disparities across multiple domains including high rates of diabetes and obesity, high pollution burdens and limited employment opportunities. Watts residents, almost exclusively people of color, (73% Latinx and 25% Black/African American), have a life expectancy twelve years lower than other parts of Los Angeles, largely due to decades of neglect the community has faced. This proposal builds on the work of the existing Watts Rising Collaborative (WRC) to address this neglect through a community-led approach to develop and evaluate an intervention that will address two primary structural factors that contribute to these disparities and health outcomes: access to resources and food insecurity and economic instability. The project will be developed through a partnership between the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, the University of California Los Angeles and Charles Drew University as well as the 50 members of the WRC and Watts residents. We will employ an intervention mapping process to refine an intervention that will develop a network of community gardens that will provide opportunities for increased access to healthy foods, green space and physical activity as well as entrepreneurial opportunities for businesses utilizing food from the gardens. Ultimately, we anticipate the intervention will decrease rates of preventable chronic disease in Watts and provide opportunities for workforce development. This intervention has the potential to positively affect the entirety of the Watts community of approximately 40,000 residents.