Organization Details:

"The mission of Health People: Community Preventive Institute, a peer-based organization, is to empower and train residents of communities overwhelmed by chronic disease to become leaders and educators in effectively preventing ill health, hospitalization and unnecessary death."

Description and/or History:
HEALTH PEOPLE is a groundbreaking peer training, prevention, and support organization based in the South Bronx. Started in 1990 as a women’s AIDS prevention and support program, Health People has grown, using its peer-education model, to provide a full range of HIV/AIDS services for men, women and families, as well as to start a large community asthma program, New York’s first diabetes peer educators program and a community smoking cessation program. Health People’s Jr. Peer programs include teens who are mentors for younger children, teens who teach asthma attack prevention and teens teaching tobacco cessation. In all its programs, Health People has successfully utilized its original model of training the people most affected by disease to become peer educators to help others and advocate for the community. Health officials from 5 continents, as well as from all over the United States, have come to Health People’s South Bronx offices to learn more about starting these effective, empowering programs in their own communities.

Chris Norwood, a prize-winning author and healthcare advocate, started Health People in 1990 as a women’s AIDS peer education program after breaking the story in Ms. Magazine that women with AIDS were routinely undercounted, and their deaths attributed to other causes. The program, then called Health Force, began in a single room at Bronx Community College. In March 2004, Health People, having grown and developed into a multi-faceted agency, spun off from CUNY, its former fiscal sponsor, to become an independent nonprofit organization. Today, the program has 46 on staff and serves some 3,000 people a year.

Contact people:

Edwin Jimenez, Office Manager, (718) 585-8585, (email) Juanita Lopez, Program Manager, (718) 585-8585, (email) Chris Norwood, Executive Director, (718) 585-1064, (email)

Address:

4 Times Square Conde Nast Building Bronx, NY 10036 (See a map)

Directions:

MTA # 1,2,3,7,N,Q,R,S,W train to 42nd Street Times Square.