The following entry has been contributed by Dr. Olajide Williams, Founder and Director of Hip Hop Public Health in Harlem.

Our slogan is “made in Harlem, good for America”.  We are a transdisciplinary group of public health experts, physicians, nutritionists, behavioral scientists, local college and high school students, hip hop artists, and children’s television producers and writers.  Our collaborating artists include Doug E Fresh, Chuck D, DMC, Kool Moe Dee, Cold Crush Brothers, and Artie Green. Our research home is Columbia University Medical Center. Our service home is Harlem Hospital Center.  We subscribe to the principles of evidence-based medicine and the common sense prescriptions of Malcolm Gladwell; “messages must be sticky and the messenger must be contagious. “

Too much analysis leads to paralysis, and it is often easier to analyze a problem than fix it.  We know the major causes of health disparities – epidemiologists and public health experts have defined and redefined these problems in thousands of journals, lectures, and interviews: we have become familiar with the terms, access, cost, quality, health literacy, and inequity. Despite the enormous challenges, there are still things we can do to make a difference in our local communities. Indeed, we believe that the failure of a public health message is often rooted in its inability to incorporate social cues and penetrate the fabric of community life. Hip Hop Public Health uses hip hop music – a contagious messenger among the youth - to inspire positive health behaviors in obesogenic environments and improve health literacy using context relevant health messages. It was created as a local response to a minority health crisis; addressing killer conditions such as obesity, stroke, smoking, hypertension, poor nutrition and lack of exercise, through hip hop music, animation, video games, interactive didactics, and disease specific interventions. To date we have created and produced 12 original hip hop songs including “Stroke Ain’t No Joke”, “Don’t Smoke”, “Exercise and Be Calorie Wise”, and “Go, Slow, Whoa!”, 5 original short animated features, and three original video games addressing specific diseases and high risk behaviors. We have enrolled over 20,000 elementary and middle public school children from the toughest neighborhoods of New York City.

Hip Hop Public Health uses a novel approach that reverses a traditional public health paradigm. Most health education programs have assumed that communication of health information flows from parent to child, and not the reverse.  Hip Hop Public Health recognizes the power of children and enlists and equips them with tools necessary to teach their parents the important health information that they learn in our programs.  We call this Child Mediated Health Intervention.  Our approach not only utilizes children to influence parental health behaviors, it also provides a targeted low-cost alternative to mass media campaigns.

 For instance, did you know that more than 50% of family food purchases at restaurants and grocery stores are influenced by children? In Hip Hop HEALS (Healthy Eating And Living in Schools)™ - one of our flagship programs, students are asked to exercise purchase influence over their parents’ dietary decision-making at point-of-purchase, using our caloric and menu board literacy, and consumer literacy modules.  In our Hip Hop Stroke™ program (a partnership with the National Stroke Association), stroke-educated elementary school children trained to recognize the signs and symptoms of stroke have saved the lives of grandparents by calling 911 while witnessing stroke at home – action that led to treatment with emergency medications that can only be administered within a short 3 hour window from stroke onset.

The role of children in the chain of public health is an underutilized opportunity. It is a strategy that fulfills the twin imperatives of empowering children and their adult caregivers. Our overarching goal is to save lives, one lyric at a time.

Hip Hop Public Health is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the New York City Council (Office of Speaker Christine Quinn and Inez Dickens), the New York City Department of Health and GE Healthcare.

Olajide Williams MD MS
Founder and Director
Hip Hop Public Health
Associate Professor
Columbia University