Marissa Jauregui, a master’s student in the Community-Oriented Public Health Practice Program at the University of Washington School of Public Health, was selected by the Office of Minority Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to serve as a 2019 Health Equity Fellow for its health equity fellowship program, the Youth Health Equity Model of Practice (YHEMOP).

Through this program, Jauregui will support the Center for Latino Community Health, Evaluation and Leadership Training at California State University, Long Beach, where she will work on a short-term project to help promote obesity prevention in the Latino community. The goal of this project is three-fold:

• To establish the Long Beach collaborative led by the Center and The Children's Clinic to address the disparate rates of childhood obesity among Hispanic/Latinx communities in Long Beach, California.
• To implement a culturally and linguistically-appropriate, family-centered Long Beach Familias Saludables (Healthy Families) intervention to reduce the prevalence of childhood obesity among families with children aged 6 to 11.
• To identify and develop strategies to address social determinants of health impacting access to and utilization of health care and services.

Jauregui will also have a chance to participate in a Health Equity Curriculum that aims to help emerging health professionals apply a health equity lens to health and social problems in future professional and/or academic endeavors.

The Center for Latino Community Health, Evaluation and Leadership Training is one of nearly 30 partner agencies and organizations set to host a YHEMOP Health Equity Fellow this summer. These partnerships provide a cooperative framework for the Office of Minority Health to develop programs and community health equity projects to engage emerging health professionals in a hands-on, field learning opportunity.

The Office of Minority Health launched YHEMOP in 2015 to support the design, implementation and evaluation of federal and public health workforce opportunities related to engaging and educating undergraduate, graduate or doctoral students interested in pursuing a career related to health care, public health or health equity.