Fresh Produce and Health Care Access in Humboldt Park GEO 242 Winter Quarter, 2011 3/7/2011 The Puerto Rican Cultural Center Emily Knight Matt Berggren Dan Causton Bobbi Jo Fernandezi Project Summary Our client, The Puerto Rican Cultural Center, asked us to complete the task of finding all locations where fresh produce can be purchased and locations where medical services are provided within their neighborhood area. This community is commonly known as Humboldt Park, and the area we specifically focused on was bounded on the east and west by Kedzie Ave. and Western Ave. and on the north and south by Bloomingdale Ave. and Chicago Ave. The client wished to have this map in the form of a KML file, in order to be used through Google Maps and Google Earth. The purpose of this project is to better serve the residents of this community. With growing rates of obesity, diabetes, and other life threatening diseases due to lifestyle choices, it is crucial that the residents of this area have the knowledge and tools they need to fight off these all too common diseases. The Puerto Rican Cultural Center provides many services to help their community members live health lifestyles, and they have asked us to create this map to assist their efforts. To begin our project, we gathered the data used by a previous class working on this same project. This old data only included locations with fresh produce, so we first updated the data and then began adding health services. After gathering this data, we hand coded it into a KML file and then compiled it into a KMZ file. This data can be uploaded to the Internet and displayed in both Google Maps and Google Earth. This map is functional and user friendly. It will allow community members to easily see where they can find health care services and fresh produce vendors. To further analyze this data, we imported the fresh produce locations into ArcMap and created a 500 meter buffer, showing the areas that have a source of fresh produce within reasonable walking distance. The area not within our buffer can be considered a ‘food desert.’ We created two successful and informational maps. They accomplished the goals that our client asked us to reach, and will provide useful and imperative information to the residents of Humboldt Park. These maps, combined with the other health resources provided by the Puerto Rican Cultural Center will help to make great strides in improving the health of the community.ii Table of Contents Project Summary…………………………………………………………………. i Table of Contents………………………………………………………………… ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………… 1 Needs Assessment………………………………………………………………... 2 Systems Requirement…………………………………………………………….. 5 Data Acquisition………………………………………………………………….. 10 Data Analysis and Visualization………………………………………………….. 13 Results……………………………………………………………………………. 16 Summary, Conclusion and Recommendation…………………………………….. 20 Technical Appendices……………………………………………………………. 211 Introduction Our client, the Puerto Rican Cultural Center is a non-profit, community-based institution, which seeks to serve the social and cultural needs of Chicago’s Puerto Rican and Latino community. It serves as a place where people come together to address the critical problems confronting the community. They do this by creating programs and services to address the needs of the community. All of the PRCC’s programs encourage participants to think critically about their reality and to promote an ethics of self-reliance based on social responsibility. They deal with health, social, and cultural issues that affect Puerto Rican and Latino and poor communities, such as AIDS, education, literacy, housing, homophobia, drug addiction, gang violence, teen pregnancy, police brutality, racism, economic and community development and human rights violations. One way PRCC seeks to improve the community is through its health. Humboldt Park sees astounding rates of obesity, diabetes and other lifestyle related diseases. PRCC holds several events to help residents improve their eating and exercise habits and to reduce their risk of these life threatening diseases. They hold cooking classes to teach the community how to prepare their same favorite meals in a healthier way and with more fresh produce. They hold regular work out classes and have organized a 5k run. All of these actions are beneficial for the community and building better habits. PRCC came to us because they believe that community members are lacking the knowledge of the locations of fresh produce vendors and health care services in the area. They asked us to create a user friendly map showing the locations of these services and basic information about the vendors. In order to do this, we first established the needs of the client. Together we set goals and objectives. Next, we determined what questions we were seeking to answer. After that, we set out to find the actual data. After data was collected, we created our maps and did data analysis and visualization. Lastly, we analyzed the results, determined our conclusions and gave recommendations for future projects. Attached at the end of this report are the technical appendices used to code the KML file.2 Needs Assessment 1. Meeting with the Client Our group is working with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, which serves as a source of community strength for the residents of the Humboldt Park area. According to the PRCC website, the “Puerto Rican Cultural Center is a community-based, grassroots, educational, health and cultural services organization founded on the principles of self-determination, self-actualization and self-sufficiency that is activist-oriented.” They offer a wide variety of services for the neighborhood, including a bilingual daycare, an alternative high school, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention classes, diabetes and nutrition classes and physical activity classes. They have a very strong presence in the neighborhood, and they are