I wanted to provide a synopsis of my meeting with Cara from PressPassTV. Yesterday, I traveled down to Copley Square to find the humble but active office of PressPassTV tucked within a 3rd story landing. Cara’s partner in crime, Joanna, was there as well as another woman.
Cara kindly treated me to a Boloco mini-burrito, while we talked about a variety of topics. At the forefront was what Cara called the two important social justice issues for which people are blamed: poverty and weight. She said a big problem is how at the national level we frame issues of nutrition and health and socioeconomic disparities to children in a way that fails to get at the root causes of the problem. It seemed the general theme was that in trying to apply palliative remedies, eliminating snack machines, getting kids to lose weight and exercise more still did not teach kids what types of behavior would make them more less healthy. I thought this was interesting because culture plays such a role in the consumption of food as well. Anyway, this was not the gist of what Cara necessarily would like me to work on for my co-design project but it was an interesting conversation that spun into the I-Word campaign, which she is currently putting together.
PressPassTV’s proposed campaign is modeled after the Drop The I-Word campaign (http://colorlines.com/droptheiword/) started by the Applied Research Center (ARC). (The ARC is an organization which advocate on a number of racial justice issues and also publishes a magazine called, Colorlines; in this magazine, one can find news and different perspectives on racial justice issues. ) At the ARC site is even a toolkit for those who want to start their own campaign.
Cara asked if I could work with her initially on planning a rollout schedule for the campaign helping with outreach to get early adapters to their campaign. Such individuals and entities could be partners and community allies of PressPassTV, community and organizational people who have made the pledge, grassroots organizations, community members, media outlets, individual journalists and academics and academic institutions.