Health Literacy Outreach Award: Healthy Pathways: programs, resources, and education for Multnomah Countys Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin communities

Over twelve months, Multnomah County Library MCL will plan, pilot, and evaluate six healthy lifestyle workshop series for 110 families in Multnomah County with a specific focus on Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Cantonese speaking populations. Our project will support these communities' health literacy needs by offering health lifestyle programs on nutrition and healthy cooking, fitness, which may include tai chi, qi gong, zumba, yoga, martial arts, and meditation and culturally relevant stress relief programs like karaoke and ping pong in their own language. Each program will include a short presentation on MedlinePlus showing participants how to access health and healthy lifestyle information in different languages by library staff. This project will focus on Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Cantonese speaking communities due to language and culture barriers which prevent healthcare information access and which have effects on long term health outcomes for these communities. We choose to focus on healthy lifestyle education because it is one of the core tenants of precision medicine, which is a focus of the NNLM Community Engagement Network and is a needed topic in these particular communities, as evidenced by health outcomes including diabetes, social isolation and low birth weights. The goal of this project is to increase participants trust and confidence in the public library as a health information resource by offering educational opportunities and access to reliable health activities and databases. Multnomah County Librarys project staff will work with the National Network of Libraries of Medicines Pacific Northwest Region and our librarys learning and organization development team to provide training to library staff that serve Vietnamese and Chinese communities on MedlinePlus. After being trained, library staff will be able to help library patrons be aware, find, and translate health information to to better their health literacy. Library staff will have promotional materials for the Research Program available at their library locations and during the programs. Staff will be available to interpret information that is not available in Vietnamese, Cantonese, and Mandarin and provide more information about the program. Providing fun community-based activities will allow us to have conversations about health resources, improving the public's access to information to enable them to make informed decisions about their health. Talkback boards and follow up surveys will be used to evaluate the success of our goals.