Dive Kulture

Latin American Health Institute

The Latin American Health Institute (LHI), New England's premier community-based public health organization, serves over 25,000 Latin American families and individuals annually through more than 24 direct care programs supported by 50 separate contracts. We also serve healthcare professionals, para-professionals, and institutions through education and training activities, technical assistance, fiscal sponsorship, and program oversight.

As a public health organization since 1987, the core of LHI's activities focuses not only on addressing specific health concerns, but also in strengthening families and developing community resources. LHI works with numerous public and private organizations across a wide range of issues in five programmatic areas: research, policy, education, service, and technical assistance.

Mission: The Latin American Health Institute is a community-based professional organization that promotes the health of the community, its institutions, families, and individuals through effective interventions that are culturally competent and technologically appropriate.

LHI Public Health Principles

• LHI constantly assesses and reassess community strengths and needs, and builds on identified strengths to address needs.
• LHI seeks to understand complex conditions from the point of view of the affected community, rather than identifying problems according to isolated, external, or academic criteria.
• LHI respects and appropriates community perceptions and standards, rather than defining the causes, characteristics, and severity of problems by so-called objective standards.
• LHI identifies opportunities and employs resources to build social capital, rather than stratifying needs and allocating resources to address them.
• LHI develops models and interventions consonant with community culture, rather than addressing problems according to external constructs.
• LHI adopts specific intervention strategies that arise organically from, respect, and reinforce the culture and values of the community.
• LHI develops long-term, comprehensive and sustainable community initiatives for well being, rather than addressing urgently critical problems exclusively or preferentially.
• LHI seeks to encourage and assist the forward movement of the community's vital center, rather than focusing interventions exclusively on needy individuals.
• LHI encourages and facilitates individual and collective participation for self-help and mutual support, rather than merely serving passive clients, recipients, or consumers.

United Divers: Our main provider of scuba instruction

Boys and Girls Clubs

The Boys and Girls Clubs in Boston (GBCB) serve more than 8,000 urban youths, largely from disadvantaged circumstances, in five clubhouses: Charlestown, Chelsea, Dorchester, Roxbury and South Boston. They aid in the development of children and youth through programs, such as: arts, education, leadership and character development.

Save the Harbor/Save the Bay

Save the Harbor/Save the Bay has helped placing several of the participants for a summer job in 2008. Its mission is to restore and protect the harbor and the bay, and to reconnect them with Bostonians from every neighborhood, regional residents and visitors alike, so that we can all enjoy the benefits of the enormous public and private investment in our revitalized harbor and waterfront.

New England Aquarium

The New England Aquarium offers Summer paid internships for adolescents during 6 weeks in July and August, which include a paid 2-hour weekly Career Skills Development workshop; at least one Environmental Leadership workshop; and field trips to Thompson Island, the Marine Science Sea Coast Center in Nahant, and hiking in the Blue Hills.

Boston Nature Center

This urban sanctuary, located on the grounds of the former Boston State Hospital, offers public programs year-round. Through its Boston Schools Initiative, the Boston Nature Center provides environmental education programs to Boston elementary schools weekly. Two miles of wheelchair accessible trails and boardwalks traverse meadows and wetlands where wildlife abounds, including coyotes, pheasants, and many species of migratory birds. The sanctuary's George Robert White Environmental Conservation Center is one of the "greenest" buildings in Boston, teaching environmentally sustainable design by example. The site also includes the Clark-Cooper Community Gardens, Boston's oldest and largest, providing food and a green oasis for 260 local families.

Interlock Media, Inc.

Interlock Media acted as Dive Kulture's fiscal agent during 2008 and provided the program with media support, producing the wonderful video found in this website. Based in Cambridge, MA, Interlock has been producing works on environmental and human rights issues for 25 years.

Boston Harbor Diving:

Jim Sullivan and Pat Green from Boston Harbor Diving donated our most popular raffle prize: two diving boat trips with their boat "Splash" out of East Boston.

Jerry Shine:

Jerry is the author of the book " A Shore Diving Guide to New England" and has contributed some of his pictures to our site.