This article reports on participatory action and photo elicitation research conducted by community health workers and university-based researchers in post-Katrina New Orleans between August 2007 and 2010. It documents how 11 African American and Latina women community health workers forged ties and developed a model for responding to some of the personal, familial, and community effects of this “unnatural disaster.” We identify and analyze two of the health literacies they developed and deployed: (1) intragroup and intergroup empathy skills and (2) capacity to critically analyze structural causes of health inequities. We argue that the participatory processes and outcomes analyzed herein offer one possible model through which local communities and health workers can creatively respond to health disparities in post-disaster contexts.
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