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So I don't have any slides or any cute pictures. You just get me.
Sorry. But I am really pleased to be here. I feel a little bit like
a sacrificial lamb. You've just heard from a bunch of very smart museum
people who do this kind of work all the time, and I'm just a shallow
television person. But I'll see what I can do.
I am very glad to be here, actually. Ironically, I couldn't join you
all for the opening reception on Wednesday because I was meeting with
the World Resources Institute and we're trying to work with them to
do a documentary on the biodiversity of ecosystems and saving the
biodiversity of ecosystems. So I'm glad to be here to both talk to
you, but also to connect with what you guys are doing so that I can
learn from this project—if we ever get this documentary funded.
You know, you've heard from a lot of people. I've looked at your agenda.
You've heard from my colleagues Fred Kaufman and the folks at NOVA,
and you've heard from a lot of museum people about how to integrate
science information into curriculums and things like that. I work
with public affairs television, the Bill Moyers documentary company.
And we actually don't do a lot of science, but what I can talk to
you about is how to take an independent media project and try to bring
it forward, bring it into the national consciousness or bring it into
schools. That's what we do. We often say in public affairs TV that
there is more to television than meets the eye. Meaning that television
can raise awareness. Television can inform. And when I say television,
you all have a great IMAX movie, it's video, it's flicking images;
things like that can raise awareness, can inform. But in conjunction
with an education campaign, it can actually inspire people to take
action. And that's what's exciting, that's what makes a difference.
So our aims tend to be fairly ambitious. They're goals like changing
the consciousness of America about complementary medicine. Or changing
the way Americans think about addiction. Our current project, On
Our Own Terms, is about changing the way Americans think about
dying and about changing end-of-life care in this country. But your
goal is even more ambitious. It's to save the planet. So I'd like
to share some of what we've learned in the 15 years we've been doing
outreach. All the lessons we've learned from our previous projects
we reintegrate as we think of plans for our current projects. I'm
going to focus on the broadcast in September, which is called, as
I said, On Our Own Terms.
We've done a huge outreach campaign around it. The subject matter
is irrelevant to what you guys are doing, but I want to describe the
campaign and why we do different things based on what we've learned
in past projects.
The most important thing I think that we've learned is that effective
action frequently takes place at the local level—in communities,
schools, museums, organizations, the local chapters of nonprofit organizations.
You know what your neighbors need. You know what's going on in your
communities. You know what can affect your communities, and you can
really make change happen there much more easily. So to get at that
local action, what we've done with On Our Own Terms is to work
at nurturing local coalitions around the country. And we've done that
by working in some cases through national organizations. We went to
the national organizations who had some interest in this field. And
when you're thinking along those lines, I encourage you to think broadly.
For this project, we went to doctors, nurses, social workers, clergy,
family members. And you need to include a diversity of experience
in your partnerships. I mean ethnic diversity, socioeconomic diversity
and, of course, professional diversity—as I said, doctors and
clergy, nurses and social workers.
The national organizations that we went to—and 64 of them agreed
to partner with us in substantial ways—we went to them because
we felt that they could commit their local chapters to this effort
and they could also act as resources. They had information that they
could share with the local steering committees. They agreed that,
yes, we want to be a part of this. The public television stations,
in our case, are also an integral part of these kinds of local coalitions
and local efforts. So we invite them all to come to a leadership conference.
At that conference, we talked about the project, we talked about the
issues for those-like our public television stations-who weren't steeped
in it. We also gave them our leadership guide: 128 pages on how to
build a coalition, how to assess your community, ideas you can implement—ideas
such as building a local resource directory for your groups, having
a town hall meeting, putting together a palliative-care hot line for
physicians where physicians can call an expert in pain relief and
symptom management and find out how to handle the problems that their
patients are experiencing. Now, not everybody can come to a conference
like that, so I think this leadership guide is a tremendous tool.
You provide agendas. You provide what folks need so that they can
do what they know they want to do. But not everybody can come, so
we put the entire leadership guide up on our web site, which has been
available for over a year at this point. And it can be downloaded
and printed out. It looks just like the one we printed. Anybody can
do it, which is great.
In order to continue to help as these coalitions began to form—and,
of course, a major part of their formation was the outreach agencies
that we work with, who made calls and connected people with one another.
But as these coalitions formed, it was important that we know what
they were up to, that they be able to tell us what was working for
them and what was not working. To have this back-and-forth communication.
So we have an e-list serve, an e-newsletter, which is a list service—it
used to go out monthly—but now we're up to three times a month.
It's virtually a weekly newsletter. It gives you information on what's
going on in the series, what's going on with the project, what new
events are happening, where you can get new tools. We also have, as
I said, agencies calling the local groups, and we also have discussion
boards on our web site.
As we talked with groups and we learned what hard information, what
specific tools they needed, we created a discussion guide. Because
many of them were doing small group discussions, and they needed something
around which to organize their groups. So we developed a discussion
guide, which is also available on the Web, fully downloadable as a
PDF. We printed and mailed them out to a bunch of organizations, but
we also created this PDF file and black-and-white templates, so that
if an organization were interested in the guide, we could send them
the black-and-white template, which they can easily xerox for whatever
use they saw fit.
We learned that a lot of them wanted promotional materials. You know,
these were small groups, the local hospital in conjunction with the
local hospice. If they were going to put on an event of some kind,
they wanted to link it back to our larger project and say, "We, the
local hospital, are working with this large public-television show."
So again, on the Web site, we have stationery that they can download,
we have our press release, we have an ad that can be used by anybody
within their newsletter. We see its use as more of a public service
announcement if an organization wants to put it in their own newsletter.
What else do we have? Our public television stations—who are
really the core of a lot of these coalitions—also talk to us
about wanting to have their own web sites. They wanted to say, "We,
your public television station, can offer you this local information."
So we created these web-page shells that they could plug their information
into—information about local resources, local stories that point
people towards information about a local event. For example, if someone
is hosting a town hall meeting, there will be information on where
it is, when it is, and how you get there. And we can link -they come
to us for the templates. We know they're using them. We can then link
from our national site to them, and they can link back, and everybody
gets a little more value.
Once all this started to roll, another tool that we found really useful
was hosting a national video conference. A video conference is like
a television show, but the key difference is that everybody in the
world can't see it. It's more like closed-circuit nationwide for anybody
who has the satellite downlink. A hospital, a public television station,
the National Guard, these are all groups that can downlink a satellite
signal. We gather a panel of experts in New York, people who are top
in the field, either in community development or in end-of-life care.
You know, my hometown of New Orleans could never get someone like
Cathy Foley from Memorial Sloan-Kettering to come and talk, but through
a video conference, people in New Orleans could go to their local
public television station. They could see Cathy Foley, among other
experts, talking to them. And they can call, fax or e-mail their questions
in and get direct responses from these experts about what they're
facing in their own community. This was a tremendous help.
Let's see. Oh, the last piece, which we see as outreach, but it's
a little bit different, is our consumer outreach. Our web site, come
August 28, two weeks before the program airs, will expand tremendously
to become more of a consumer web site. Right now it's very much an
outreach web site. But we'll have articles, we'll have interactive
pieces—and as you've heard from a number of people, you've got
to keep people entertained. You've got to keep them interacting with
your work. We'll have articles. We'll have art therapy, where you
can put together your own pieces. We'll have resources where people
can say, I need this kind of help right now, and we can help them
get it.
So we've been incredibly excited by the results so far. We have well
over 100 local coalitions in place right now. We're five months away
from broadcast. Almost all of these coalitions have multiple events
happening; town hall meetings, small group discussions, the creation
of local programming, the creation of local resource guides. These
partnerships are the key to our outreach, because you're working with
people who know the issues, who have systems in place, and who are
so committed. And what they can bring to your efforts is tremendous,
and you have to be responsive to them. You have to be grateful for
all the work they're putting in, free of charge in most cases.
The other key to success, we found, has been communication both with
our partners and among the team that builds our tools and builds our
site. Now, I should say that communication is not the same as information.
And this was brought home to me recently. My great aunt Dora, who
just turned 93 years old last Tuesday, was at the doctor recently.
And the doctor came up to her with a stethoscope and was listening
to her chest wall and said "Big breaths" and she said remorsefully,
"Yes, they used to be." Information was exchanged, but that was not
communication. So I stress this because, while we have found that
coordination is important, frequently people will overlook it. You
have to budget time and you have to budget money to do it. Our team
talks once a week on the phone. It means that your promotion team
is going to be looking over your discussion guide. It takes a lot
more time to do it that way, but you end up with a cohesive look,
a cohesive effort, and a lot less frustration on the part of those
all-important partners I was talking about. They understand how everything
works together, and people can send folks to the right place. So it's
more time on your team's part, less time on your local partners' part.
Well, I guess that's it! I mean, it is an exhausting but very rewarding
experience to do this kind of work. I've been doing it for 10 years.
It's great. It's amazing what you can accomplish. And you really feel
like, when you've got a national media piece around which you can
focus, people get so excited, and it makes a huge difference. So I'm
really looking forward to seeing what you guys end up accomplishing
with Life in the Balance, because it's a great project and,
as I said, I'm hoping we can learn from you guys.
Thank you very much. The web site address is http://www.pbs.org/onourownterms.html
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