betsy yagla photo

Ariana Stover (left) and Karlie Allen document their finds while CARE outreach coordinator Maurice Williams looks on.

Potato chips and packaged rice dinners tower above Ariana Stover, who's standing in a narrow aisle inside a corner store in New Haven's West River neighborhood.

"I see a lot of high fat, high sugar options," she says, taking a detailed survey of the inventory as she walks past a display rack with Nutter Butters and Swiss Rolls. "I don't see any low-fat options. There's no alcohol, but there's tobacco," says the 14-year-old on her way out of the store.

Stover exits the corner store to report her finds. She's one of six students who are "asset mapping" the city — identifying the healthy and unhealthy parts of New Haven's neighborhoods — this summer. The students are working under the city's Youth@Work program which gives teens summer jobs, and their research will eventually be used by Yale in conjunction with community groups to create policy proposals to curb obesity, smoking and other causes of chronic diseases.

Next to the corner store Stover takes a photo of a pizza restaurant.

"Are they healthy?" Stover asks a supervisor.

"I don't think so — they've got 'jumbo' meals," comes the answer.

Stover and Karlie Allen, a recent graduate of Hill Regional Career High School, spent an afternoon walking the streets of the West River neighborhood earlier this week on the first day of the project. They were followed by Joel Suarez, a 15-year-old junior at Eli Whitney Technical High School, who taped their every move for a documentary about the project.

"I want to focus on how unhealthy our cities are," says Suarez, who lives in New Haven's Hill neighborhood. Of particular concern to Suarez are corner stores' cigarette ads which are posted at "child height," he says. "They're targeting kids."

Yale's Community Alliance for Research and Engagement (CARE) is running the project as part of an international initiative called Community Interventions for Health. Similar projects have been carried out in four countries. The asset mapping has always been done by a traveling team of professional adult researchers. New Haven is the first North American city to participate, and the first city to have local teens documenting their own neighborhood's assets and problems.

Interactive, online maps of each neighborhood's resources — like dance studios, parks and restaurants — should be available by the end of the summer. The maps will be used to help residents make healthier choices, and connect the dots between their daily activities and their long-term health.

"If people can eat healthy, it will decrease diabetes," says Allen, who has several diabetic family members. "I want people to think about what they're eating before they put it in their mouth."

Allen says she often sees parents shopping for groceries at the corner stores, where few fresh fruits and vegetables are available. The stores' stock tends to dictate the neighborhood's diet.

The data students will amass by the end of the summer will be used to lobby for change and push public policy, as it's been used in other places where the project has been.

In China, for example, researchers found few labels on food products at chain grocery stores, and people are now lobbying for more nutritional labels, says Dr. Denise Stevens — whose New Haven–based company, Matrix Public Health Solutions, created the prototype for the project. Stevens has participated in all the international asset mapping to date, and tagged along for a few hours in New Haven.

"Everyone's recognizing that we have to do something now about chronic disease, or we're going to lose a lot of lives," says Stevens.

The students' work is just a first step, says Bill Quinn, the city's health department director. Quinn is launching his own 10-year project focusing on health inequity, and he'll incorporate some of the students' work. He cites disparities like the fact that African Americans are twice are likely to be hospitalized as whites, and African Americans end up in the hospital 10 years earlier than whites.

"All these things are preventable," he says. Quinn wants to document the root causes — poverty, housing choices, education — of inequity in health. Then, he wants to show policy makers how to prevent these problems.

"Health directors have known this for years," he says. "We just need to document it."