Hunger Knows No Recession

Almost every day New Yorkers pass by someone asking for money, in the subway, on the sidewalk, in the park. Homelessness, hunger and persistent poverty are so visible we sometimes literally trip over the poor. Most of us look the other way not because we don’t care, but because solutions to these problems seem overwhelming. More than a million people are hungry and can’t afford to buy food in New York – and that’s why Camino PR was honored to take on a client at the forefront of both alleviating hunger and offering real and compassionate help that creates a path out of poverty.

Camino client Yorkville Common Pantry (YCP) provides millions of groceries and meals each year as the largest single site for alleviating hunger in New York. But the YCP mission is not only to provide emergency food for a family, it is also to provide the realistic and compassionate care that families need to move out of poverty. Check out this video of Halana Richardson talking about YCP– it’s worth taking a few minutes to hear her story to understand the complexity of hunger in America.

As the job market worsens, YCP estimates that it will have a sharp increase of 19% in the number of people who face hunger in the coming year. Camino PR’s Andrea Hagelgans and Pablo Toledo went to YCP to help them tell their story to NBC News for a special on hunger in America. Here’s a behind-the-scenes clip of the filming.

Behind The Scenes with The Yorkville Common Pantry from Camino PR on Vimeo.

YCP is New York City’s unique provider of assistance to the hungry, including providing more groceries and meals at a single site than any other program, and helping people become more economically stable by offering assistance with obtaining food stamps and housing, preparing for employment with basic services like showers and job counseling, among other practical and compassionate services. They even provide cooking classes to make help people eat healthy and stretch food stamp dollars. Camino PR was thrilled to partner with a community organization that takes a holistic and compassionate approach to hunger.

YCP won the prestigious Robin Hood Heroes award this month, which includes a $50,000 grant. That’s a huge honor, but more donations are needed to meet the skyrocketing need for basic food assistance. According to Stephen Grimaldi, executive director of YCP, “in this dismal economic climate many families throughout New York City face a bare table. Families of all means should be able to celebrate the holidays without choosing between paying rent or buying food.”

This holiday season consider supporting Yorkville Common Pantry or local food banks in your area.

Talking about abortion in Mexico

Mexico City pays for early abortion for any women who seeks it.  Contrast that to the U.S. healthcare reform efforts, which have devolved into a debate over how best to reassure taxpayers that federal funds will not be used to pay for women to access abortion.

We can learn a lot by studying the communications strategies of Mexican health advocates, who a few years ago defied all odds and legalized first trimester abortion in Mexico City. “We didn’t take the streets, we took the media”, observed Maria Luisa Sanchez Fuentes, one of the primary leaders of the Mexican legalization movement.

We recently sat down with Sanchez Fuentes when she was an honored guest speaker at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health gala.  We asked her to talk about what communications strategies broke through the political and religious barriers that had thwarted efforts for decades to legalize abortion anywhere in Mexico. GIRE, the national Mexican organization headed by Sanchez Fuentes, has a long road ahead to further liberalize legal access to abortion in Mexico.  The political and legal backlash to the Mexico City gains in other Mexican localities have been severe.  But what is clear is that GIRE and their allies are walking down a different message road than U.S.-based abortion supporters, and creating public support for legal abortion within a very different values context.

You can watch the interview with Sanchez Fuentes here.

The first thing that might surprise you is the amount of support that exists for legal abortion among Mexicans.  In the United States, the conventional wisdom often is that Mexicans on both sides of the border are guided by Catholic doctrine on abortion.  While the influence of Catholic leadership must be seriously considered, this blanket assumption needs another look.  A recent poll by the Mexican government found that 62% of Mexicans say they “don’t believe the government should intervene in a woman’s right to choose.”  In Mexico City, a poll commissioned by the Population Council found that  66% of residents “thought the city’s decriminalization laws signaled a step forward for the country”.  In media interviews, Catholic leaders in Mexico bemoaned the practice of Catholics straying from church doctrine and warned healthcare providers that they will go to hell for providing abortion.  In what may be a sign of Catholics separating their decisions on abortion from their religious beliefs, one Catholic abortion provider in Mexico City said she may end up going to hell, but not for providing abortion care.

Recent polls in the United States show some movement in public opinion among Latinos, but more research is needed to fully understand the real views of this demographic. Pew’s latest poll on abortion attitudes found that “while whites have become significantly more pro-life, the movement among Hispanics has been primarily into the undecided camp”.

Sanchez Fuentes described what has – and what has not – been effective in abortion messaging among Mexicans.  Their best message focused on the decision, and who had the right to make it.  This dialogue was grounded in human rights language, connecting human values to the decision-making process.  Rather than focusing on an individualistic perspective, such as the interruption of a life plan, their messages focused on the complexity of the decision, such as when and how to start a family.  They took on opponents with a messaging campaign about “life” and “family”  taking ownership of the complexity of those concepts.

These message strategies are in synch with a recent worldwide survey of attitudes about human rights.  Mexico led the world in support for women’s right to have full equality compared to men as well as the desire to have government play a larger role in preventing discrimination against women.  In contrast, respondents in the U.S. strongly endorsed the concept of gender equality but did not favor greater government efforts to achieve equality.  A survey of attitudes is a great distance from lived realities, but it may demonstrate an opportunity to center reproductive health access in a human rights message model.

Sanchez Fuentes suggests that U.S. and Mexican movement leaders come together to learn from each other.  A cross-border summit on messaging and reproductive health could, among other things, help us deepen our understanding of promoting a values-based discussion in political climates that are deeply impacted by religious doctrine.  As Mexico lurches forward in liberalizing abortion access while the United States teeters on the edge of backsliding, such a cross-border convening could be a powerful strategic investment.

Kennedy and Leadership

Senator Ted Kennedy was deeply engaged in civil rights and equal rights. As a man of immense privilege, he uniquely saw the struggles of those whose lives were very different.

Senator Kennedy voted against the nomination of John Roberts as Supreme Court Chief Justice because he was not convinced that Roberts fundamentally understood the role of civil rights and equal rights in this country. Further, he didn’t believe that Roberts would be a leader in this country’s march toward equality. Kennedy’s unfavorable opinion about Roberts was heavily influenced by Robert’s comments about the role of judicial leadership during the Brown v Board of Education decision, when most white Americans were in favor of segregation.

Like Kennedy, last month Senator Graham raised the issue of Brown v Board of Education during a Supreme Court nomination hearing. This time it was Judge Sonia Sotomayor under scrutiny. Senator Graham asked Sotomayor about judicial leadership and the Brown v Board of Education decision. Graham explained to Sotomayor that had he been a Senator at the time of the Brown decision, he probably wouldn’t have been “brave” enough to stand up to segregation like the Justices did. In contrast to Kennedy, Senator Graham expresses a very different view of leadership and its responsibility to civil rights.

Kennedy became a Senator on the heels of the Brown decision and he was a forceful leader in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After 11 failed attempts, the civil rights legislation finally passed.

Kennedy was right to judge the qualification for leadership through the prism of civil rights and equal rights. He is missed.

Kids on the Border

The Arizona Daily Star printed an article today about Project Libertad, a new media project (supported by CPR!) that amplifies the voices of Mexican adolescents living near the Mexico-Arizona border.  Pablo created this storytelling initiative to give voice to the kids growing up at the center of border wars and wading through gritty realities like family separation, poverty, violence, discrimination, and under-education.

Pablo translates the unfiltered voices of adolescents into fictional narratives.  He first imbeds himself in a community, provides tools for authentic stories to emerge, and turns these stories into a feature film or other digital media product.

His first feature film, Runnin at Midnite, explored the midnight basketball culture of youth in the barrios on the U.S. side of border.  In the development phase of this first effort he established a youth educational program in Tucson’s south side.  Only kids who had been kicked out of many high schools were eligible to study filmmaking with Pablo, with just one catch: they had to show up everyday to work toward their GED.

The teens who shaped Runnin at Midnite were not the  model “at-risk” youth that are the delight of intervention programs.  Pablo’s kids were beyond at-risk, they were post-risk.  In fact, the Department of Labor had classified this community as one of the nation’s neediest in regard to at-risk youth. Many participants were teen parents, most had a history of drug or alcohol use, most had a criminal record, most lived amidst serious violence, all lived in poverty.  These teens were well beyond the No Child Left Behind hype.  But a strange thing happened when Pablo handed them a camera and taught them to tell their authentic stories: they re-engaged high school studies.  Pablo’s high school graduation rate among these youth was so high that it earned him kudos from the White House.

Many of these barrio kids can be seen in the acclaimed Runnin at Midnite.  In this next film effort, Project Libertad, Pablo heads across the border to Mexico.  For the last few years Pablo has been traveling to Mexico to visit with people in the underbelly of border crossing politics: people who wade through sewer tunnels to cross underneath the border, kids living on their own while their families do seasonal work, families living in shacks and whole communities terrorized by cross-border drug wars.

Pablo starts this next film project by teaching border kids in Mexico about the art of storytelling.  His workshops are in formation now; more kids in need than he can ever serve are anxiously hoping to participate.  If you’ve got any inclination or ability to sponsor some of these kids, please send a donation.  Or if you can’t donate, please become a fan of Project Libertad on Facebook.  This story will unfold over the next few years and I guarantee you will be fascinated to watch it from the inside.

Goodbye Ghost Fly

Inevitably we would leave the Camino PR starter office.

Our basement office was once a stable for the work-horses that carted baked goods through Manhattan.   In the first weeks we hauled out debris and installed large bamboo mats and oversized desks to create a comfortable but frugal workspace.   We sanitized everything, but still I was so convinced that rats and roaches would make their appearance that my mother shipped us a diaper-genie type trash can that tightly  seals any evidence of food.  I was wrong to be afraid, only two living creatures emerged: a horse fly that periodically buzzed through the office like a Blue Angel air show, and a gigantic wasp that spontaneously reproduced and then flew away.  I don’t know why the wasp visited, but I believe our supersize fly held the spirit of horse flies past, reminding us to recognize those things upon which we build our future.

Our carriage house was the kind of office where you could sketch on the wall and spill paint on the floor.  One day Woody Allen and Larry David showed up and turned the carriage house into a temporary movie  set.  Many Tuesdays we ended the day with creative hour, when Tomas and Sean would practice guitar and Mary would bring in a bag of sweets from the Donut Pub.

But there were downsides too.  It’s the kind of office that makes you worried about getting your nice suit dusty from crumbling pillars.  The air was stale and smelled vaguely of horses, despite our abundance of aromatherapy and the constant whir of the air purifier.  The original window and door could not be sealed, and on frigid days the narrow stone stairwell created a wind tunnel that swept directly into our meeting area.   Cell phones sputtered as if we were in a bunker and every evening we wrapped our computers in colorful silk scarves to prevent them from taking in too much dust.

“We aren’t a typical corporate office” Loretta often says, words I soothe myself with when we are doing other-duties-as-assigned like pouring animal-friendly salt on the icy stone steps.   I have known many lovely typical corporate offices but we’ll always be a little quirky, like our carriage house roots.  We have moved just two  blocks.   We now work on the floors above a poster store that houses the largest collection of movie posters in the world.   Oversized double doors in our top floor open onto a large wooden deck that gives us a rooftop view of Chelsea.

After working hard underground we are taking in deep breaths of  fresh air.  I am grateful for our roots and for the friends who give us momentum.  Goodbye first Camino home.  Thank you and goodbye, ghost fly.

Smart Judges

This has been a good week for women in Washington DC.

Yesterday President Obama announced two important federal judicial appointments.  Judge Emily Hewitt, nominated to the U.S Court of Federal Claims, began her career as one of the first group of women ordained to Episcopal priesthood in 1974.  Prior to her judicial career, Judge Hewitt was among the religious leaders who led the effort to open the priesthood to women.  Obama also announced the nomination of Marisa Demeo to the DC Superior Court.  Judge Demeo formerly headed the D.C. office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and was one of the most prominent and powerful civil rights advocates in Washington D.C.

Putting smart people on the federal benches is always a cause for celebration.  Nominating judges with a history of leadership on social justice issues makes this a major celebration.  These are just two of many high quality appointments coming out of the Obama administration.  Congratulations to these nominees!

The condom melee

Ah, the Pope and condoms.  I first publicly criticized the Pope’s views when I was a teenage columnist for a Gannett newspaper, but my editor censored the piece.  The Pope was on a U.S. tour and the paper was worried about reader backlash.  Not much has changed since, except now my daughter is the teenager.  The Pope has ratched up his attack on condoms (claiming they aren’t effective at preventing HIV), and lots of parents and the media are still treating condoms like a four-alarm scandal.

Last week about a dozen students at my daughter’s middle school were inadvertently given condoms during a celebration of “National Women and Girls HIV Awareness Day”.   A 48-hour morality melee ensued.  Some parents of the condom kids were shaken and angry, multiple apologies from school and public health officials were rushed out over two days, news media descended on the school, and teachers gave their students impromptu lessons in how to say “no comment” to aggressive reporters.

Exactly one year ago the CDC released startling findings: one in four adolescent girls has a sexually transmitted infection.  Another study found that by 9th grade, 32% of teens were sexually active.  This year school officials teamed up with public health advocates to conduct an HIV awareness poster contest and a health fair to help prevent these middle school kids from becoming part of this statistical nightmare.

The school didn’t intend to distribute the condoms – some health fair bags from a high school event got mixed up with the middle school bags – but the incident raises the uncomfortable question about what messages and information ought to be shared with this age group.  Statistically, a third of these eighth graders will be sexually active within a year.  When and how should they get access to condoms?

On the afternoon that ABC camped out at the middle school for at least four hours, the principal asked those of us who worked or lived nearby to help shield the students from the cameras as they left school.   Many of the parents and security staff  were furious that ABC news was filming kids.  The sensationalist media had turned the  lesson about disease prevention into a real life display of the taboo nature of dealing with emerging sexuality.   Any middle schooler who thought  they could safely engage the subject of sex with adults at Thursday’s health fair learned by Friday that the subject was wildly explosive.

When the cameraman began filming the students exiting school, a number of adults were on hand to help the kids move down the sidewalk without being filmed. I began taking pictures of the ABC crew.  The ABC reporter screamed at me from across the street, punching his finger in the air, “this borders on harassment!”.  That’s when I got mad.  I couldn’t film him while he filmed my kid?

I calmed down and respectfully called the ABC producer in charge of the story, who apologized for the reporter’s behavior.   I explained that I had been positioned across the street with my palm sized digital camera and he said it wouldn’t have mattered if I were inches away, anyone has the right to film the activities of his crew.

Then the producer and I had a good discussion about the impact of sensationalizing condoms. What lesson, if you were thirteen, would you walk away with as you watched the media treat the mistaken condom handout as a major scandal?  Through the eyes of a middle schooler it’s not so different from the Pope’s rigid position: condoms are risqué and most definitely off limits.  His focus had been on whether ABC was adhering to journalistic standards; he hadn’t been focused on the impact of the coverage on area teens.

I didn’t expect the editor to kill the story – four hours of a stakeout by ABC, complete with dozens of interviews in half a dozen locations, was too much of an investment to throw away.  But the end result was a very, very brief story and modest footage.  I’m convinced that the editor paid attention to the community impact of ABC’s news decisions, as well as to the anger of the community that had been targeted.

Making your voice heard in the media can help soften the sensationalist treatment of adolescent sexual health.  But you don’t have to wait for a media moment to be influential.  If  you’ve got kids in your life and you’d like to be proactive in promoting sexual health, here are some resources you might offer them:
Sexetc.org (for teens)
Teenwire.org (for teens)
A reference book titled “It’s Perfectly Normal” (for kids and young teens)
A reference book titled “It’s So Amazing” (for kids and young teens)

Protesting Corporate Excess

On Thursday people who are fed up with the corporate climate are attending protests in cities nationwide.  There’s a lot I’m supposed to do on Thursday but nothing seems more urgent than sending a loud message to those who continue to contribute to a broken economy and corrupt corporate culture.  I’ll be heading to Wall Street to protest.  Please make your voice heard on Thursday — you can get more information about actions in your city at http://takebacktheeconomy.org/

Check out their video below:

Equal Treatment

Yesterday’s AOL headline about celebrity chef Cat Cora and wife Jennifer Cora expecting babies is yet another display of the media mainstreaming of gay relationships. AOL news treated their relationship in the exact same way it treats heterosexual couples, reporting “Iron Chef and her wife are pregnant”.  Fox used the term “lesbian partner” in its headline and used a sensational tone in its coverage, but they did lead the article with “The Iron Chef and her wife….”

Homophobia still has a firm grip in our culture but I like these small pebbles of progress.  Editing out bias in media coverage is a good barometer that change, at whatever pace, is underway.  Over the years I’ve tended to seek out deliberately gay-friendly refuges, like an Olivia cruise or a week in Provincetown.  Several years ago I was looking for a place to take Winnie to dinner, and on a whim typed “best lesbian chef” into Google.  It’s not the best way to figure out if the food is good, but I was looking for a friendly environment.  To my surprise I found a list of “best lesbian chefs”.   I chose the only chef on the list located in Manhattan, and that’s how we came to fall in love with Anita Lo’s restaurant, Annisa.  Anita Lo has my vote as the best chef in New York and Annisa has become our celebration restaurant.

Winnie and I stopped by Annisa for a drink and appetizer a few weeks ago.  We are never organized enough to get reservations, but sitting at the bar meant that we could chat with Anita when she emerged occasionally from the kitchen.  She was glad to hear we had come from a fundraiser for the Audre Lorde project, and when we told her that Gloria Steinem had hosted the event at her apartment she immediately asked, “what did she serve?”  Winnie told her we’d eaten quiche and Anita started laughing.  “That’s really funny!” she said, shaking her head as she retreated to the kitchen.    Winnie laughed with Anita but I know, deep down, neither of us really knows why that’s funny.

Here’s the AOL headline:

Congratulations go out to Jennifer and Cat Cora on their baby announcement!

Marketing Values (not!)

“The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living”
- window display for Design Within Reach

A high end furniture design store in Manhattan’s Flatiron district stenciled this quote from a famous designer on their display window (see pic below).  I passed by it late on a Saturday evening.  A homeless person was huddled below the sign, creating a mini encampment in the freezing midnight air.  Visible from the sidewalk were bed frames on sale for just over $2,000.

Next to this design store is Fish’s Eddy, a housewares store that was displaying a stenciled plate of a floorplan, complete with “servants quarters”.  The store was papered over to look like it was the victim of the recession, when in fact the faux bankruptcy look was being used to simply promote a sale (see pic below).  This is an establishment that looks at recession and oppression and sees marketing opportunities.  Earlier that same day my daughter and I stumbled upon a favorite restaurant with a tax seizure sign posted on its windows.  The restaurant looked as if it had been abandoned just as the waiters were setting the tables for dinner.  “It’s like everyone was vaporized, like in the movies”, she said, sounding incredulous like the rest of her uneasy recession generation.

The novelist John Galsworthy wrote, “Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.”  I wonder if the marketing folks at Design Within Reach thought at all about the homeless and the millions of panicked households worried about “survival” when they stenciled the windows.  It must not have occurred to Fish’s Eddy that using the trauma of foreclosure and bankruptcy as a marketing gimmick might be, well, mean.  And the nostalgia plates with the floorplans that include “servants quarters”, especially in our Obama era of “hope and change”, must be targeted at those whose lives and legacies are not marred by class oppression.

Even before Bono’s (Red) campaign, everyone in the field of “buzz” was buzzing about the importance of values marketing.  The problem is, you’ve got to have a handle on some values worth celebrating if you are going to try and use values for your own marketing gain.  Bono’s got his eyes squarely on the elimination of AIDS in Africa.  The Design Within Reach exec’s must be looking inward at their own profit margin.  CEO Ray Brunner brings in about $1.2 million each year in compensation.  Among his directors is branding consultant Hilary Billings, co-founder of Red Envelope. The magazine Fast Company described Billings as someone who “mastered the art of creating “lifestyle brands” – products and services that forge an emotional connection with customers.”  Billings points to three factors that define a “lifestyle brand”: it makes life easier, it makes your world more stylish, and it is an orchestrated strategy that is fully formed at a brand’s launch.

The problem may be that marketing the luxury lifestyle needs to be redefined.  Or perhaps, thinking more radically, does the luxury lifestyle itself need to be reconsidered?  The idea of a $2,000 bed frame being “within reach” may be more symbolic of pre-recession excess than a reflection of smart brand management.

DWR’s stock price has plummeted from $4.50 last May to about $0.66 today.  The company is considering options like merger or sale.   So it may be that the company is thinking of its own death when it compares survival to furniture design.

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