Salud Latina/Latino Health (SL/LH) was established in 1989 in Illinois as a national/regional capacity-building and technical assistance organization to design and adapt prevention and care services targeting a growing Latino/Hispanic sero-positive population living in the Midwest. The first 12 years of the organization were devoted to engaging with health departments and community-based organizations to design local responses to an emergent HIV epidemic. Consequently, numerous programs and services were permanently established in Wisconsin, Michigan, Kentucky, Kansas, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Anticipating the major role that people living with HIV/AIDS will play in the formulation of culturally competent and outreach interventions, SL/LH became one of the pioneer members of planning groups that shortly became institutionalized as Community Planning Councils. To maximize communication and maintain provider engagement, SL/LH organized multiple regional conferences and meetings, published a provider journal on a quarterly basis, and established in the early 1990s one of the first Web sites to be used as a forum for training dissemination.
Through its second decade, SL/LH kept its commitment to building new infrastructures addressing HIV, responding to the sudden growth of Latino demographic representation not only in affluent urban centers but also in less integrated suburban and rural communities where Latinos are more likely to be less engaged with primary care providers, less likely to have a form or knowledge of accessing health care systems, and be less assimilated and more prone to risk behavior. To attain successful programmatic development and build a community-based infrastructure, SL/LH worked with traditional supportive systems of people living with HIV/AIDS and primary health care. The organization also worked with nontraditional groups, including faith institutions, small community businesses, and educational, correctional, welfare, and recreational facilities. This community mobilization effort provided ground to lessen key barriers such as cultural apprehensions, stigma, and fear of testing.
Responding to the need to provide Latino/Hispanic culturally competent and effective HIV prevention interventions, SL/LH has successfully adapted the Popular Opinion Leader Effective Behavioral Intervention to a Spanish-speaking population living in suburban and rural areas of the Midwest. Furthermore, concerned about the limited availability of Latino/Hispanic HIV prevention strategies, SL/LH has taken the lead in designing and piloting home-grown interventions that serve specific at-risk groups. With the support of the Illinois Department of Public Health, SL/LH designed Platicas de Comadres, a model based in the Stages of Change theoretical framework that addresses women's needs to develop safer sex negotiation skills and understand their susceptibility to HIV/STD infection.
The model was originally designed to be delivered by hair stylists who were trained with a story-telling educational methodology accompanied with practice exercises that facilitate the understanding of stages of change. Once the pilot and evaluation were completed, the model was challenged with riskier populations, such as partners of formerly incarcerated individuals, becoming a successful strategy to adopt condom use, request timely testing, and overcome fear of learning about test results. The model is currently endorsed as a community practice by the Illinois Prevention Community Planning group.
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