Lorena Carrillo is a Mexican immigrant who supports her family as a domestic worker in San Francisco. Domésticas like Carrillo can feel invisible in the well-to-do neighborhoods where they work. That’s changing, however, thanks to a highprofile advertising and social media campaign that plasters domestic workers’ faces on billboards, buses, and blogs as if they were fashion models. The goal is greater awareness of everything from workers’ rights to nontoxic cleaning products that reduce health risks for domésticas and employers alike.
This creative campaign is one of eight to emerge from a national, three-year initiative called New Routes to Community Health. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Benton Foundation, New Routes aims to improve the health of vulnerable and often isolated populations by enabling immigrants to use media to tell their own stories.
User-created content focuses on a range of topics and employs an assortment of digital tools. In Boston, Haitian immigrants are producing a series of radio soap operas, or telenovelas, to raise awareness of depression and anxiety within their community. In Chicago, young Latinos are writing and staging theatrical productions that break down cultural taboos about sexuality and other sensitive topics.
Although they differ in details, the eight projects “all deal with mental health issues in some way,” says Beth Mastin, New Routes’ program director. “It’s all about the disempowerment and dislocation that come with trying to make a new home in a foreign country.” New Routes’ Web site amplifies the conversation by posting content from all eight projects, creating a media-rich clearinghouse on immigrant health topics.
To ensure collaboration, proposals had to include three partners to qualify for a three-year, $225,000 grant. Each project includes a managing partner, media partner, and immigrant partner. “The immigrant partner is first among equals,” Mastin adds. Managing partners, mostly universities, provide grant management along with academic expertise. Media partners, such as station WHYY in Philadelphia, handle technical training so that immigrants can use digital tools successfully.
That leaves immigrant organizations to focus on developing content that matters most to the populations they serve, whether it’s Latina victims of domestic violence in Oakland, Calif., or Somali refugee families coping with mental illness in Minneapolis. Projects build local leadership capacity, Mastin adds, “so that immigrants literally find their voice and are able to articulate their concerns.”
Ba Nguyen, an elderly Vietnamese immigrant living in Philadelphia, is a good example. At a digital storytelling workshop in the WHYY studios, she was a quick study when it came to using video gear. Before long, she was teaching other elders from Philadelphia’s Southeast Asian community how to conduct on-camera interviews. Their digital stories will help fellow immigrants overcome language and cultural barriers so they can better communicate with doctors about hypertension and other health concerns.
Read more stories by Suzie Boss.