Immigrant Media Making, New Voices for Community Health

A new report offers guidance for community organizations and those who fund social change in how best to harness the power of local media-making for community health improvement.

It explains the value of immigrant media making as a tool in community building and leadership development. To conduct the research, Health Forward Consulting interviewed leaders such as media makers, immigrant leaders, social innovators and philanthropists who fund health, media and immigrant concerns.

New technologies offer a sea change in opportunities to connect. More people will continue to use easily accessible media. Specifically, does increased access to media offer value for health improvement initiatives in communities experiencing significant health disparities?

A recent grantmaking program, New Routes to Community Health, funded eight community media partnerships designed to encourage innovative use of locally produced media for health improvement in immigrant communities. The projects took place in vulnerable immigrant communities with limited English proficiency and low-wage jobs.

As the New Routes projects unfolded, lessons emerged that were salient for community health improvement.

First, unanticipated project leaders emerged during the media-making process.

Second, communities often chose to focus on issues related to mental well-being and social functioning in their media-making efforts.

Third, youth and young adults often played critical roles as “brokers,” navigating cultures, languages, generations, systems, and new technologies.

At the same time, the projects demonstrated that forging partnerships across organizations and cultures, combined with a focus on complex health issues, required time, patience, and persistence. Grantees also reported that having looser grant requirements allowed them to follow an iterative process that reflected the dynamism of immigrant and refugee populations.

The projects demonstrated that in-language media can clearly offer value to health improvement efforts in immigrant communities.

New Routes to Community Health is a program of the Benton Foundation, funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is dedicated to improving health and health care for all Americans.

Abriendo las Cajas (Opening Boxes), a partnership project between ZeroDivide, La Cliníca de La Raza, and BAVC, is an innovative multi-media health campaign working to reduce incidences of domestic (familial) violence amongst the Latin American immigrant population in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, California.

Abriendo las Cajas (Opening Boxes) seeks to provide a safe and empowering space for youth, men, and women of this community to share their experiences with their families, community, and general public.

For more information on this partnership, please go to: http://newroutes.org/projects/abriendo

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