Suggestion Box

As President Obama said on his Thanksgiving address last week, I hope you all had a wonderful holiday “eating great food, watching a little football, and reflecting on how truly lucky we are.”

Here at the National Children’s Study, we are thankful for the opportunity to contribute to such a significant undertaking as improving the health of all children. We would be unable to do that if we did not have the support of our amazing community partners, who week by week over the past twelve months continue displaying our posters and brochures at their locations, inviting us to community events, and referring people to call our number if they are interested in participating.

As our VideoVoice project is coming to an end, we asked our neighborhood ambassadors for their thoughts and suggestions as the National Children’s Study moves forward in Cook County. Here is what Maria had to say:

“Some of the things that I can recommend are basically the same things that people recommended me or the same concerns they had about it. Among them is the expansion of the selected communities, perhaps to include more communities in order to admit a larger number of children.

Perhaps, contemplate the possibility of having women who become pregnant prior to eighteen years of age because that is a reality in our community. There are many pregnant women under eighteen, [whom] regrettably could be left out of this program having the opportunity to study the effects precisely which that premature pregnancy could have on the baby throughout his life.

Another would be to emphasize more our program through television, radio, mass media, utilize the media so that people know about us even more. Those are the main things that I would suggest the Study.

Of course, to continue working, to persist bringing information to the families. Perhaps one more thing that could work quite well is to bring specific information about topics of interest to our community. For example, health topics, mental health topics… In our Latino community, one of the main concerns is how the environment affects the emotional health of its inhabitants.”