Expanding health disparities in a growing number of countries worldwide coupled with their accumulating negative health effects across the life course underscore the importance of addressing the social and environmental factors underlying these effects from an early age. Improving health, educational, social, and environmental opportunities for young people across the socioeconomic continuum can arguably be accelerated through “bottom-up” community-driven approaches that can complement and extend more traditional “top-down” policy approaches to change. Involving youth directly in participatory action research that builds their skills and agency in achieving relevant changes to their local environments can have additional benefits related to increasing their feelings of engagement, belongingness, and empowerment. Results from a set of U.S. youth studies employing a particular community-engaged citizen science research method called Our Voice will be presented. These studies have targeted a range of educational venues (elementary school through college) as well as other community settings; diverse youth populations across the socioeconomic spectrum (low-income through affluent); and a range of community health issues (i.e., safe routes to school, neighborhood safety, local park access and use, gender-based violence and gender equity, mental health, clinic-community partnerships in promoting safe environments during the COVID-19 pandemic).

Among the types of community changes to which youth citizen scientists have been able to effectively contribute have been enhancements in a safe routes to school program resulting in double the number of school-based safe routes programming events as well as double the number of elementary school children walking/biking to school compared to a control school; reporting of unsafe sidewalks and illegal neighborhood dumping of trash from surrounding affluent neighborhoods; initiation of recreational activities at a local park that were youth-developed and contributions to programming for teens at a downtown temporary pop-up park; identification of strategies to reduce the probability of gender-based violence among undergraduates and enhance graduate student mental health in a university setting; and citizen science activities capturing COVID19-related community safety issues experienced by families from disadvantaged neighborhoods in partnership with their local health care providers.

Challenges and future directions for this type of promising participatory research method will be discussed.

Purpose: The supportive role of the built environment for human health has become a focus of interdisciplinary research, policy development, and intervention. Within the multisectoral efforts to build healthy cities, participatory approaches represent a potential course for better targeting context-specific factors that can hinder or facilitate healthy living. The overall purpose of the Our Voice in Bogotá study was to apply the Our Voice citizen science research model to engage residents through the lifespan, including youth and adults, to assess facilitators and barriers to healthy living in five urban settings including schools, public transportation, markets, the Ciclovía open streets program, and public parks.

Methods: We conducted thematic analysis to 1) critically review the findings to comparatively build transversal categories based on similar themes across the five evaluated settings, 2) recode the setting-specific data using the transversal categories and 3) assess lessons learned by using a life course approach to identify youth-specific relevant findings (focus on data collected by citizen scientists between 9 to 18 years old).

Results: We identified nine transversal categories relevant to almost all the evaluated settings: infrastructure, maintenance, human talent, green spaces, availability and access to sport facilities, food availability, citizen culture, accessibility and transportation, and complimentary services. All of which underline the community level of action, indicating that citizen scientists found the facilitators and hinderers of healthy living at this level the most important. Regarding the youth-specific findings, the most reported barriers across the urban settings assessed by youth citizen scientists (schools, markets and the Ciclovía) were the bad maintenance of facilities, poor waste management and limited healthy food availability. In terms of facilitators, youth citizen scientists underscored the green spaces, availability of sports facilities, and citizen culture.

Conclusion: The transversal categories comprise citizen scientists and stakeholders’ discussions and can impact different settings by acknowledging life course appropriateness. Beyond the location-specific nature of the findings from each evaluated setting, Our Voice in Bogotá also brings relevant findings to advance health-promoting initiatives in urban settings across ages. Additionally, Our Voice in Bogotá facilitated youth advocacy for improvements within the evaluated settings. 

Purpose: Adolescents face various socioecological and environmental factors that influence their opportunities for physical activity (PA) and choices for healthy eating, further compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to identify these factors and adolescents’ perceptions concerning PA opportunities and food choice decisions. 

Methods: Adolescents (N=143) were recruited from 3 high schools in Cape Town, residing in low or middle-high income communities. Anthropometry, self-reported PA, dietary habits and knowledge and neighbourhoods walkability data were collected, as part of a larger, multi-country study. Of these, 33 participants of both genders between the ages of 13-18 years were purposively selected as citizen scientists’ In-depth telephonic interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematically analysed. They used a mobile application to take photos and provide audio narratives of factors in their immediate environments that were barriers to or facilitated PA and healthy eating, before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Emergent themes were classified into different levels of the socio-ecological model: intrapersonal, interpersonal, environmental and policy.

Results: Preliminary analyses indicate that before the COVID-19 pandemic, unhealthy eating and physical inactivity were influenced by household foodways and attitudes toward physical activity (interpersonal), preferences, screen time and “laziness” (intrapersonal), and easy access to unhealthy food (environmental). Peer pressure, unsafe environments, time constraints and unaffordability of healthy food were unique to adolescents from low-income communities. Organised sports in school and outside of school were more common for adolescents from middle-high communities, while chores and active transport dominated the PA activities for those from low-income areas. The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in South Africa impacted negatively on the PA levels because of reduced mobility. Healthy food choice decisions were adversely affected by food insecurity in some households, particularly as some learners relied on school feeding programs, but positively impacted because of limited access to fast food outlets and convenience stores. 

Conclusion: These findings will form the basis of interactive advocacy workshops with the citizen scientists, for their input and proffered solutions to the barriers and to empower them to advocate for changes in their immediate environments for healthy and active living