The Project
Creative Corps Inland SoCal, a state-funded initiative of the California Arts Council (CAC) in collaboration with the Inland Empire Community Foundation (IECF), Arts Connection – The Arts Council of San Bernardino County, Riverside Arts Council, and the California Desert Arts Council, awarded 53 recipients with more than $3.8 million in grant funding designated for artists, community-based organizations, and public agencies, to support creative initiatives that advance awareness around public health, the environment, social justice, and civic participation. ECV Health Outcomes Illustrated, a project by Coachella Valley residents Dean Mayo and Bob Marra, was selected as a grantee through an external evaluation process that included community stakeholders from across both counties.
The theme that guides the subject matter of our photos and stories is known as the social determinants of health. Residents of the communities we cover – the City of Coachella and the unincorporated Riverside County towns of Thermal and Mecca – suffer from far worse health outcomes during their lives than those living in higher-income areas primarily because of what is referred to as social risk.
A recently completed study commissioned by Desert Healthcare District (Huron Consulting Group – 2023) found that overall social risk factors leading to poor health outcomes are 41% higher in the Coachella Valley’s high-risk zip codes (including Coachella, Thermal, and Mecca) than for the low-risk zip codes within the District. In fact, the study concluded that within our designated area, the social risk to residents because of transportation challenges, housing insecurity, the risk of being uninsured, severe lack of access to adequate healthcare services, and the environmental problems created by air pollution and lack of consistent daily access to clean drinking water are much higher than the national average.
As a result of these challenges, residents in our project area suffer from a much higher incidence of cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, asthma and opioid-related adverse drug events.
We believe that by documenting, through creative photography and storytelling, the wide range of the social risks being endured by residents of our project area we can help elevate the general awareness of their true needs in a more humanistic way than has been done in the past.
Part of our mission is to help empower community leaders, elected officials, and local residents to better tell the story of the problems facing people in the project area. We want to help elevate these issues by telling the stories of residents' social risk challenges in extremely compelling ways. We think this approach will garner attention in the greater Coachella Valley region, and beyond, leading to a higher and more specific awareness of the urgent problems and hopefully lead to more investment by both the public and private sectors to bring resources to solve problems.
The issues we will bring to life many of the social risks in the project area, including transportation challenges, housing insecurity, the risk of being uninsured, lack of access to adequate healthcare services, and the environmental problems created by air pollution and lack of constant access to clean drinking water. Each of these social risks will be illustrated via photos of a combination of people, places, and things in the region that help tell the story of the challenges people are facing.