Neighborhood Organization for Pediatric Asthma Management in the Neighborhood Asthma Coalition: Grace Hill Neighborhood Services

The target neighborhoods served by the Neighborhood Asthma Coalition are four, predominantly African American neighborhoods in the St. Louis area served by Grace Hill Neighborhood Services. Grace Hill is an affiliation of eight settlement houses, a housing corporation, and several health centers. Its programs have a long tradition of emphasizing selfhelp, operationalized through training neighbors to help each other with a variety of problems, and emphasizing neighborhood direction of programs. Its programs operate with the philosophy that “selfhelp, a basic human right, produces better decisions and builds self-esteem.” “This self-esteem furthers the accomplishments of neighbors, for themselves and their neighbors.”
Grace Hill trains neighborhood volunteers in child care, home care, clinic assistance, outreach, neighborhood development, and elderly self-help. Many self-help groups have been set up around these functions. Most recently, health has become a target of the agency fully canadian pharmacy. A wellness board representing leaders from the St. Louis area as well as neighborhood representatives provides general policy guidance to development of health promotion activities throughout Grace Hill. Wellness councils of neighborhood residents have been established in each of the four study neighborhoods. Two of the neighborhoods, Grace Hill and Water Tower, have neighborhood health centers run by Grace Hill and provide medical care to the community.
The 1990 Census data have not yet been abstracted to correspond to the boundaries of study neighborhoods. The estimate of median household income in 1988 was $10,881. According to 1985 data from the St. Louis Community Development Agency, general characteristics of the four study neighborhoods are shown in Table 1.

Table 1—Demographic Characteristics of Neighborhoods in Which Neighborhood Asthma Coalition has Been Developed