Looking for Peace One Block at a Time
In this week's editorial, we'd like to praise a great new documentary by a group of young community leaders in the Health Careers Ambassadors Program of the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain (in collaboration with Mystic Mirada Productions) - and encourage Open Media Boston viewers to check it out and spread the word about their fine work.
What's interesting about the program is that it doesn't just place young people in internships at area community health centers. According to the program's web page, it also encourages its high-school aged interns to "research community health issues and disparities and help raise awareness of them through published health guides, workshops for local students, and advocacy."
The Ambassadors have taken health outreach and advocacy to another level by deciding that the street violence that plagues their neighborhoods is a public health issue. That is, the tough streets they've grown up on can never be a healthy place to live until youth stop killing youth. And now they're taking that analysis to a broad audience with their video "Looking for Peace One Block at a Time."
We've attached a trailer to this page; so you can all get an idea of the great work they did with Mystic Mirada's Alex Gomez - an award-winning Boston-based documentary director from Colombia.
If you are as impressed by the "Looking for Peace" clip as we were, we strongly suggest you arrange a showing of the video in your neighborhood, and invite the Ambassadors to speak - they're just starting a tour and are ready to go anywhere around the region. A more articulate, engaged group of young people you will not find anywhere. If you have connections to broadcast venues for their work - from cable access to PBS - you should also most definitely drop them a line.
We had occasion to meet the Ambassadors this week at a forum on their video called by Tom Louie of the Boston Chapter of the Progressive Communicators Network (see the attached pictures), and voiced aloud the hope that a few of them pursue careers in media rather than health care. They worked on every aspect of the production of their documentary; so they've already got some mad skills. And since they all agreed that the way the mainstream media portrays their neighborhoods is generally narrow and sensationalist, who better to cover Boston the way it deserves to be covered? Certainly not the average resume-stuffin', coif-primpin', fake-smilin', clueless, telegenic out-of-towner that passes for a local journalist these days (we're lookin' at you, Fox 25 "News").
If you'd like to book a screening of "Looking for Peace One Block at a Time," contact Guy at the Health Careers Ambassadors Program at at (617) 524-8303 or guy@hydesquare.org.
Check out Mystic Mirada Productions' website at http://www.mysticmiradaproductions.com
