A Healthy Baby Girl -- Community Alliances

USING A HEALTHY BABY GIRL TO BUILD COMMUNITY ALLIANCES

by Judith Helfand and Pamela Calvert

Communities are divided by class, race, and power. But toxic exposure does not respect geographic or social boundaries. The struggles faced by a DES-exposed family in a Long Island suburb are intimately related to those of agricultural workers using pesticides, Agent Orange-exposed Vietnam veterans, and nerve gas incinerator "downwinders" in Utah. What links them is a single group of endocrine-disrupting synthetic chemicals, responsible for widespread devastation across space and time.

A film as personal as A HEALTHY BABY GIRL gets people together and talking in a non-threatening atmosphere. The story of a middle-class suburban Jewish family openly dealing with the impact of DES-related cancer translates the abstract threat of toxic exposure into something that can happen to anyone. An emotional and empathetic response from a roomful of strangers stimulates conversations that challenge long-held social attitudes about who is safe and who is vulnerable. This is an opportunity to bring together people who might never meet each other -- a hazardous materials trainer from a plastics factory, a suburban DES mother, an activist from a working-class community dealing with cancer clusters -- generating "unlikely alliances" across class lines and opening the opportunity for collective action.

Often the very groups that are fighting toxic issues are known to the public only in the heat of battle. Their image is commonly presented by the media as confrontational and single issue-based. Though a position on the frontlines is critical, groups can also get trapped by stereotyping, isolated from the very people they're advocating for. Communities facing toxic exposure can't afford to be divided in these ways.

How can A HEALTHY BABY GIRL foster these alliances, and what effect can they have?

In Northampton, Massachusetts, our screening at that town's film festival generated a half-page feature story in the local newspaper linking DES to Western MassCOSH's work on toxic exposure and reproductive health hazards from pesticides and manufacturing. This local angle was a surprise to the reporter, and the community gained a new perspective on a workplace health and safety organization as fighting public health battles on their behalf.

At the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, we invited activists into our festival screenings who are working against the nearby dioxin-emitting nerve gas incinerators. This led to three local newscast reports on the health connections between DES and dioxin, as well as a major story in the conservative Mormon-owned daily newspaper, the Deseret News, focusing on the anti-incinerator work of the West Desert Healthy Environment Alliance. As a result, the Utah PBS affiliate committed to produce a civic roundtable at the time of A HEALTHY BABY GIRL's broadcast -- inviting the coalition of environmental and health activists we had identified.

WHAT IS THE HEALTHY BABY GIRL STORY IN YOUR COMMUNITY?

With this community action guide, you can plan a screening of A HEALTHY BABY GIRL that brings your community together to deal with the threat of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We recognize that people find these issues frightening and overwhelming - which can lead to paralysis or cynicism -- and so this guide provides immediate and concrete resources and actions. It is possible to feel vulnerable and powerful at the same time, and that is the perfect moment to organize. You can start by taking these steps:

What is the "Healthy Baby Girl" story in your community? It might be something that you've been working on for a long time. Or there might be more than one story. It might be hospital incineration, or pesticides, or a neighborhood cancer cluster: you can use the discussion questions in the next section as a checklist. Your community might be dealing with more than one of these issues; the best approach is to look at them together, since that is how alliances may begin to form.

Who are the people or organizations working on the issue, really putting themselves on the line? Are they working in isolation? In what context does the community know them? How would coalition-based support advance their work and lead to greater health for the community as a whole?

Beyond the groups working directly on the specific toxic issues you have identified, where are other potential allies? DES-exposed people, cancer survivors, and secular and faith-based advocates for family health, the environment, and workplace health and safety all have a stake in your community focusing on endocrine-disrupting toxins. However, they may have no experience in working together. Identifying and enlisting a broad range of sponsors for a screening of A HEALTHY BABY GIRL -- not just the "usual suspects" -- will bring diverse constituencies into the room, making "unlikely alliances" and collective action possible. You can use the resource section at the end of this guide for leads: call the national organizations listed for local affiliate contacts, or find local counterparts.

The press can play a powerful role in your strategy. Make the connection between A HEALTHY BABY GIRL and your community's story, using the screening and the photo-op of your unlikely allies as the news "hook" which makes the story timely and compelling. Be creative when approaching the press: you might get a positive response from arts, science, health, "living" section, religion, or metro reporters, depending on the specifics of your situation.

Use our website: we will have information about what other people around the country are doing, and we ask that you share your ideas, successes, and challenges as well. We would love to hear about your plans and the links you're making in your community. We will be able to talk about your work in national press interviews, gaining more visibility for the national HEALTHY BABY GIRL project as a whole and your community in particular.

Once you've identified your partners and are planning the screening, remember that the size of the gathering is not the primary goal. Your event can be a success whether there are 10, 40 or 80 people. These forums are about talking together and building new alliances.

Use this guide liberally in structuring your event. Before the screening, you can introduce the film by reading the filmmaker's statement. When the lights first come up, people will have a strong emotional response to the film. This is where people make the empathetic connections that make all the following work possible, so it's important to encourage that personal response before moving on to discussions of strategy. The conversation will naturally flow into "What do we do now?" They will be looking for something immediate, concrete, and local. In addition to the resources and campaigns you bring to the screening, you can use the discussion questions as a jumping-off point.

Please make sure to document your discussion following the screening. You might want to videotape your discussions, use audio, or simply take notes and write up a summary. Be sure to take a group photo! Whatever method you choose, please share the results with us afterwards on the website.

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