Background and Purpose
While there is growing faith in community organizing to influence policy as a way to improve the built environment and increase food or recreational equity, relatively little research is available comparing and contrasting the processes and outcomes of community organizing in Latino communities attempting to reduce obesity.  This paper presents preliminary findings from two community-based organizations organizing to increase access to physical activity and access to healthy foods in predominantly Latino areas.  The organizations are part of Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE), a national initiative of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to prevent childhood obesity.  Both community-based organizations achieved redistribution of public resources to improve local safety, though they used different leadership models and organizing activities.  We discuss the study’s implications, such as the need for evaluation research that examines community organizing as 'intervention' for changes to public policy.

Objectives
For participants to: 1) Understand that there is very little formal evaluation documenting organizing efforts designed to reduce obesity. 2) Describe the similarities and differences between the policy change goals of each organization. 3) Describe the similarities and differences in leadership development and community organizing activities of the two organizations. 4) Describe the outcomes for each organization.

Methods
We present preliminary process and outcome evaluation findings from two organizations organizing to increase recreational justice (increased access to physical activity) and food equity (access to healthy foods) in predominantly Latino areas. The organizations are the Community Coalition (Coalition) in South Los Angeles, CA and La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) in Texas. We report on one year of process and outcome data that is qualitative and quantitative from the first year of project implementation for both grantees, January 1, 2011-December 31, 2011. We conducted phone interviews with each organization every three months (n=4) using an in-depth structured interview protocol. Organizations self selected at least one staff for the interviews that were most intimately involved with the community organizing activities of the CCHE project.  Typically, we interviewed simultaneously two staff per grantee and most often they were lead organizers, project coordinators or directors.  Interviews lasted one-and-a-half hours, on average.  We also reviewed archival documents for each grantee, such as grants and newsletters.

Results
The organizations differ in their long-terms policy goals.  The Coalition focused on changing land use policies (nuisance abatement to increase public safety) and gaining funds for prevention programs to increase recreation activities that will ultimately impact residents’ ability to burn more calories while consuming fewer non-nutritional calories.  LUPE’s policy focus is to make it easier for residents to burn calories via availability of health promoting environments, such as street lights and walking trails.  Both organizations share similar organizing strategies and tactics which include personal visits, door knocking, neighborhood or apartment building or house meetings, phone banking, and to a lesser extent, social media.  These strategies along with popular education are used to build their community resident base and develop their resident leaders.  Collectively, the organizations had a base of almost 300 and just over 70 leaders.  LUPE’s parent/ resident base was 476 and 67 of these were leaders.  for the Coalition, the numbers are much smaller given the relatively small area of the target neighborhood, with a parent/resident base of 223, of which 30% are youth (n=45), and 8 are leaders, most of which are parents/residents.   The organizations also differ in the type and nature of support they receive from “like minded” groups or organizations.  The Coalition has eight allies.  The most typical way allies provided support is by sharing or agreeing to share resources (e.g., staff, monetary, expertise), followed by allowing the grantee to use the ally’s name as a supporter to the CCHE campaign, participating in strategic planning, or leveraging outside resources for the grantee.  in contrast to the Coalition, LUPE has not engaged allies on this particular campaign, though it has an active network of allies from previous campaigns it can count on if needed.  Each organization achieved public and social policy outcomes, specifically related to resource allocation.  for instance, the Coalition obtained funding for needs driven recreation programs from the City’s Parks and Recreation Department (e.g., Summer Night Lights) despite local and national trends of cutting recreation programs if not entire elimination of parks and their programs.  LUPE secured funding from three commissioners who had committed to installing solar powered streetlights in five colonias and obtained a commitment for a walking trail in one colonia.

Conclusions
Both organizations achieved their objectives. While both are trying to improve safety, they do it for different reasons. Moreover, LUPE wishes to see relatively immediate health results while it is unclear when the Coalition expects to see healthier food options in the area.

Support / Funding Source
The primary author recognizes support for this study by a grant from RWJF New Connections program.