Taller Salud, Inc.

Taller Salud is Puerto Rico's oldest feminist organization centering its work to enhance women's access to healthcare, reduce violence in community settings and boost economic development through direct service, community organizing and advocacy since 1979. Our mission is to uplift women's leadership to transform Puerto Rico prioritizing the health and wellbeing of our communities as the primary mechanism to build collective power. Focused on health advocacy, violence prevention, and environmental justice, our main headquarter is located in Loíza, a municipality 16 miles east from San Juan with approximately 25,000 residents, 48% of which live under the poverty line. Both leade... read more Taller Salud is Puerto Rico's oldest feminist organization centering its work to enhance women's access to healthcare, reduce violence in community settings and boost economic development through direct service, community organizing and advocacy since 1979. Our mission is to uplift women's leadership to transform Puerto Rico prioritizing the health and wellbeing of our communities as the primary mechanism to build collective power. Focused on health advocacy, violence prevention, and environmental justice, our main headquarter is located in Loíza, a municipality 16 miles east from San Juan with approximately 25,000 residents, 48% of which live under the poverty line. Both leadership and staff reflect our communities in race, gender, socioeconomic status, cultural traditions and language. Some of our most important contributions to our community’s well-being are: 1) Our Community Health Workers network with over 100 women trained using the promotoras model to reduce health inequity and increase health advocacy capacity in our communities. 2) A 65% sustained decrease in violent deaths and criminal activity in Loíza since 2012 due to our community violence intervention work. 3) Our Gender-Based-Violence Community Task Force, where over 60 stakeholders work tirelessly to bridge gaps in victim services and strengthen coordinated responses to end GBV in our islands. 4) Our Climate Justice Leadership cohort with over 100 community leaders organized using our Disaster Preparedness and Food Security frameworks to advance policy changes that better protect communities against future climate threats. This work is a result of our role as first responders and advocates through hurricane Maria (2017), the Pandemic (2020) and hurricane Fionna (2022). Because we deeply believe that when women thrive, so do their communities; our current priority is to drive a major social investment into uplifting women-of-color’s leadership while creating a safe space that weaves relationship building, joy, healing and emancipation. Taller Salud integrates direct services, community organizing and advocacy as a holistic model to advance health and well-being for our communities. Throughout the past four decades we have witnessed how our approach works in many different ways. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, Taller Salud pioneered advocacy work denouncing forced sterilization, HIV's biased research and the lack of prevention and early detection protocols for breast cancer. Taller Salud's members were also part of the committee that drafted Puerto Rico’s Domestic Violence Act. In more recent years we spearheaded a public-health-centered project to reduce gun violence in Loíza; launched Puerto Rico’s first culturally-specific project to address gender-based violence in afro-descendant communities; provided mutual support and aid to over 60,000 disaster survivors; published a Community Protection Guide for Disaster Preparedness to address emergencies from a collective standpoint; released three community research reports on vulnerable housing, food insecurity and public safety to advance advocacy efforts towards racial, climate and economic justice; established a Community Health Workers network to reduce health inequity and increase health literacy; launched a reproductive justice campaign that halted the approval of bills restricting abortion care access in Puerto Rico; and acquired and remodeled five properties to establish a resilient centers network throughout the island. Due to these achievements Taller Salud has received the Richard Holbrooke Humanitarian Award (Refugees International, 2019), the Tina Hills Award for Outstanding Work in the Non-Profit Sector, (Fundacion Angel Ramos, 2021), the Invincible Partner of the Year Award (Planned Parenthood, 2022) the Visionary Voice Award (National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2023), and the Puerto Rico's Public Health Award (University of Puerto Rico, 2024).