A healthy environment means healthy eating and active living, but it also requires a sense of security that can take many different forms. We develop a fuller picture of the health of our communities when we tell and listen to the stories about everyday life in our neighborhoods, of what streets and spaces are safe and where both good and bad health behaviors are occurring. PhotoVoice is a health promotion strategy which allows people to document the strengths and concerns of their community and make them known to policy makers through photography. Through mapping, PhotoVoice also becomes a way to describe how place-based policy, whether positive or negative, has real, visible impacts on all of us.

The concept of PhotoVoice was developed by Caroline C. Wang and Mary Ann Burris. "PhotoVoice entrusts cameras to the hands of people to enable them to act as recorders, and potential catalysts for social action and change, in their own communities." (Caroline Wang, 1994). Through our partnerships with community-based organizations, community councils, and public health departments, we hope that the joining of PhotoVoice with mapping will help drive place-based policy change that directly addressing the stories told and pictures taken by our communities.

The Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Program (CCROPP) gave cameras to youth from the region and asked them to document and tell us, in their own voices, about some of the ills of their community. Take a look at what they had to say.