EL PUENTE COMMUNITY HEALTH & ENVIRONMENT (CHE) INSTITUTE:

Recognizing the intrinsic relationship between the environment, science and well-being, Luis Garden Acosta launched CHE in 1997 as a community driven center for scientific research, community organizing and wellness, inextricably linked to all aspects of El Puente’s work. Rooted in El Puente’s ideology of collective self-help and self-determination, CHE employs an indigenous led, development-oriented approach to health—one that acknowledges the community’s health in the context of our science, values and traditions. Today, El Puente’s CHE is the only federally funded, Latino community-driven, environmental justice research project in New York City; an emerging family health clinic; a green and open spaces advocacy movement emanating from El Puente’s Espiritu Tierra Community Garden; and, CHE is El Puente’s lighting rod for community organizing campaigns. Through CHE (including the Promotoras de Salud and the CHE Activistas) and its antecedent groups (such as Earth Spirit, the MASH Ministry, Los Curanderos(as), Nature’s Pride and the Toxic Avengers), El Puente engages its membership in a variety of projects directed to addressing issues of community health and environmental justice. El Puente, whose pre-opening working title was The Southside Health Promotion Center, was the first adolescent, primary diagnostic and referral clinic in North Brooklyn (first supported by Greenpoint Hospital and then Woodhull Hospital).

Throughout the years, CHE’s predecessors have not only garnered such outstanding awards as the NYS Governor’s Decade of the Child Award for leading the state in childhood immunization campaigns and the NYC Department of Health’s Excellence in Public Health Award but have also co-founded the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYCEJA) and created and led the celebrated Community Alliance for the Environment (CAFÉ)—that defeated the development of a 55-story incinerator—with the support of the United Jewish Organizations (UJO) and the New York Public Interest Research Groups (NYPIRG). CHE’s "Elders" launched the reforesting of Bushwick and Williamsburg, helped redesign and advocate for the successful renovation of existing parks and, building on the work of Habitantes Unidos in the early 80’s, designed, rebuilt, and inaugurated a new, New York City Department of Parks waterfront park (Grand St. Park) with the support of the Parks Council (now New Yorkers for Parks). El Puente’s Espiritu Tierra Garden was designed and built (with the Parks Council’s help) over a three-year period by the young members of El Puente Earth Spirit who took a "two-story high" garbage dump and transformed it into a beautiful meditative, music and medicinal herb garden. With Centro de Investigacion Epidemologia Tropical (CIET) as our leading mentor, the CHE’S Promotoras de Salud (along with the CHE Activistas) directed a three-year epidemiological survey on asthma netting valuable scientific findings that led to El Puente selection as the first community organization to publish a scientific article in the American Journal of Public Health.