Seeking DIRECTOR OF OUTREACH

For PBS Health Disparities series

 

California Newsreel, the oldest non-profit documentary film production and distribution center in the country, is seeking a Director of Outreach to help plan and coordinate an ambitious public engagement campaign around a forthcoming, four-hour PBS series examining the underlying causes of our alarming socio-economic and racial disparities in health.  The campaign aims to use the broadcast as a catalyst for reframing the American debate around health, moving the discussion "upstream" to social determinants.

 

Responsibilities:

 

Coordinate the planning of the senior Public Engagement team consisting of the Communications Director, the Executive Producer and the Director of Outreach.

 

*	Coordinate and support the planning work of the series' 'Dissemination Brain Trust' advisory team of health disparities policy makers, scholars and advocates 
*	Identify, reach out to and organize partnerships with selected national health, justice and other stake-holder organizations 
*	Develop strategies to engage community-based health equity organizations 
*	Conduct advance planning for a Capitol Hill "Sneak Preview" launch event and briefings 
*	Recruit and support partners to convene additional "Sneak Preview" launch events and 'town hall' meetings in key communities across the country 
*	Arrange key public and professional association screenings and symposia across the country 
*	Coordinate and manage the writing and development of background materials for the press kit, Briefing Papers for policy makers, and the Tool Kit for community-based organizations 
*	Liaison with and help to craft cross-promotion strategies with other health disparities initiatives 
*	Assist the Executive Producer in drafting the Public Engagement Campaign work plan, proposal and budget

 

Knowledge and Experience:

 

The candidate should have a demonstrable ability to communicate effectively and work collaboratively with governmental, community, medical and academic partners, and multiple levels of staff.

 

*	Evidence of a working understanding of the social determinants of health disparities; an MPH helpful but not necessary. 
*	Experience in community organizing or educational outreach, especially in communities of color 
*	Minimum of three years of experience in journalism, communications, public relations, and/or health policy 
*	Demonstrable commitment to racial and economic justice and health equity

 

Skills:

*	Excellent writing and editing skills; demonstrated ability to produce quality written materials 
*	Proficiency in project management, specifically with multiple projects, priorities and deadlines 
*	Excellent speaking and listening skills 
*	Excellent organizational, planning, and interpersonal skills, including the ability to work both independently and within a team 

 

Considering 2/3 time for nine months, full time for six months, or a combination thereof.  This position reports to the Executive Producer.  Re-location to our San Francisco office is not required. MUST BE AVAILABLE TO START ASAP.  California Newsreel (www.newsreel.org) is an equal-opportunity employer; persons of color are encouraged to apply.

 

 

To Apply:

 

Read attached project summary

SEND COVER LETTER AND RÉSUMÉ to California Newsreel

Fax: 415-284-7801; or  Email: [log in to unmask] 

Principals only, please. No phone calls.

Accepting applications until May 4.

 

 


Project Summary:


HIDDEN EPIDEMIC (working title)


Is Inequality is Making Us Sick?


Copyright © California Newsreel 2006

 

 


A Four-Hour Series and Public Engagement Campaign


 

Produced by California Newsreel (www.newsreel.org <https://server.newsreel.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.newsreel.org/> )

In association with the National Minority Consortia of public television

Presented by KCET/Los Angeles

 

 

"Real people have problems with their lives as well as with their organs.  Those social problems affect their organs.  In order to improve public health, we need to improve society."

-         Sir Michael Marmot, Chair, World Health Organization's (WHO)


      Commission on the Social Determinants of Health


 

Hidden Epidemic will, for the first time on film, investigate the sources of our huge and appalling socio-economic and racial disparities in health.  The four-hour series, produced by California Newsreel in association with the five Minority Consortia of public television and presented by KCET, will sift through the evidence suggesting that there's more to our health than bad habits, our meds, or unlucky genes, that the social environment in which we are born, live and work profoundly affects our well-being and longevity.

 

Conceived as part of a larger public engagement campaign in association with leading health, public policy and community-based organizations, Hidden Epidemic aims at nothing less than a paradigm shift among the general public and policy makers both, one that links our individual aspirations for better health to social and economic justice.

 

This is a story that implicates all of us.  Experts of every political stripe agree:  our medical care system is strained to the breaking point. We're spending almost $2 trillion a year and rising on health care, more than 15% of our GDP.  We spend twice per person on health care than any other nation in the world. Yet American life expectancy ranks 29th in the world; Costa Ricans live longer.  We're 26th in infant mortality; about the same as Cuba.  One third of Americans are obese.  Illness costs American business $260 billion a year in lost productivity.  

 

Further, research has revealed a gradient to health.  It's not only the poverty-stricken that are afflicted-afterall, what would be so surprising about that?--but the middle classes as well. At each descending rung of the socio-economic ladder, people tend to be sicker and die sooner.  Top executives have on average better health than managers, managers fare better than supervisors and technical personnel, supervisor do better than line, service, and clerical workers, and the unemployed have the worst health of all. Americans who haven't graduated from high school have death rates two to three times those who've graduated college.  George Kaplan of the University of Michigan reports that poverty and income inequality kill more people than "the combined total from lung cancer, HIV/AIDS, unintentional injuries, suicide, and homicide."

 

Yet at each socio-economic level, African Americans are worse off than their white counterparts, In many cases, so are other people of color.  And the mortality gap has been growing. African Americans live on average almost six years less than white Americans.  Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher and his colleagues calculated that in 2002, 83,570 African Americans died who would not have died if black-white differences in health did not exist, a rate of 229 "excess deaths" per day. That's the equivalent of one Boeing 767 being shot out of the sky and killing everyone on board every day, 365 days a year, points out David Williams of the University of Michigan. And they are all black. According to a by-now landmark study by Drs. Colin McCord and Harold Freeman, African American males over age five in Harlem are less likely to reach age 65 than men in Bangladesh. Among Native Americans and Latinos, the prevalence of diabetes is 100% higher than among white Americans.

 

This epidemic is not driven, as commonly believed, by drug overdoses, gunshot wounds or even poor medical care (as poor as it is).  Nor, despite the newspaper headlines, is there anything different about the genes of people of color.  Rather a growing body of research over the past 15 years indicates that there is something about life in America that is disproportionately targeting - and killing - the less well-off and people of color with chronic diseases:  heart disease, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, asthma, even cancer. 

But what? How does socio-economic status and racism get under the skin? Through what channels does inequality - the cumulative disparities in housing, wealth, jobs, and education - combined with the lack of power and control over one's life, translate into bad health? What is it about our poor neighborhoods, especially poor neighborhoods of color, that is so deadly? How are the lifestyle decisions we make (e.g., diet and exercise) constrained by the choices we have? 

 

While there are by now thousands of studies tracing the pathways by which racial and socio-economic status affect health, there is virtually no popular media - no print, TV, nor web - that translate this research into forms that can build public understanding of how social policies are de facto health measures.  The 'common-sense' wisdom is simple:  the poor and minorities get sick because they have unlucky genes, or they are just too lazy and undisciplined to eat right, exercise and abstain from drugs and booze. Similarly, it is still widely believed that it's top executives who are dropping dead from heart and artery disease when in truth it's their subordinates.

 

Hidden Epidemic will help change that. We take as our brief these words from the announcement of the WHO's new Commission on the Social Determinants of Health: "Evidence is rarely if ever sufficient by itself to catalyze political action. In political terms, what might be at least as crucial as the evidence itself is the 'story' in which it is embedded."

 

As David Williams points out, improving quality of opportunity, providing education and training for better jobs, investing in our schools, improving housing, integrating neighborhoods, better jobs and wages, giving people more control over their work-these are as much health strategies as smoking, diet and exercise.  And these are the stories Social Ills will tell.

 

 www.newsreel.org <https://server.newsreel.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.newsreel.org> 

 

 

 


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