Main communication challenges

Deliver a series of complex video messages about fishing legally and safely, avoiding resident fish, and choosing salmon, the safer choice.

Create a video product that would be understood by the mostly non-English speaking population, practically and culturally, and readily used by local Community Health Advocate programming.

Manage the partnership between two large government agencies and one academic institution, and devise messaging that would satisfy the communication objectives of each organization, including additional partner organizations.

Background

In 2001 the Duwamish River was listed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority (or “Superfund”) list of sites requiring cleanup. Since that time, federal, state and local agencies and community organizations have been developing strategies to clean up the toxic legacy of a century of industrial activity along the river. In the meantime however, people can still fish safely and legally on the Duwamish, as long as they catch only salmon and follow certain guidelines. Despite many public education efforts however, many people continue to eat toxic resident fish.

The question quickly became how to get critical safety messages to the fishers — especially members of the Cambodian, Latino and Vietnamese communities — who fish that stretch of river.

Online videos turned out to be the answer, per recommendations by community members who participated in a city-funded program and now serve as Community Health Advocates for Public Health–Seattle & King County. These Community Health Advocates, from Duwamish-adjacent communities, work directly with fisher communities to educate about communities about important issues concerning public health and the Duwamish River.

The University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) Superfund Research Program (SRP), a key project partner, reached out to me and collaborator Fahad Aldaajani with the goal of creating the online video series.

Process

In the research and investigation phase of the project, I learned about Public Health of King County and Seattle’s Community Health Advocate program, a robust initiative training local community members interested in public health to become health education ambassadors. The “Community Health Advocates,” or CHAs for short, were passionate and highly engaged educators already teaching their local communities about the issues surrounding the Duwamish River.

One of my biggest concern was use and uptake by the Community Health Advocates. With outreach, all too-often there is a disconnect between how people on the ground use a material, versus the perception of what that material should be, especially when numerous community partners are involved.

Budget and timeline were also limiting factors: we could have worked with the CHAs to develop animation or explainer-type videos, but the budget and timeline didn’t support the amount of time and level of production this would have required with the goal of producing 7+ videos.

Taking into account that skilled community members were already doing much of the work of the videos off-camera, I pitched the idea of working with the CHAs directly in co-producing a documentary-style series covering all of the target messages: legal, public health, and cultural.

The idea was a hit. The CHAs and partner organizations all supported the idea, and so off we went.