Projects

The 2Cooltura project was created in 2006 for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the Department of Justice. Thanks to a generous renewal grant from the Department of Justice, SRF and Hispanic Communications Network have come together again to help Hispanic youth get out of and stay out of gangs.

The 2009-2010 phase of 2Cooltura will utilize the project’s already established branding but tailor the media, outreach, and website to two specific geographic locations and cultural populations: Montgomery, Maryland and Wake County, North Carolina.

The Latino gangs of Maryland are primarily composed of second-generation Latinos, while the Latino gangs of North Carolina are mostly first-generation immigrants. Localizing both projects will enable us to streamline the program message while also catering to the specificities of each community in order to have a more acute impact.

For a taste of what this year’s media products will look like, check out our original 2Cooltura PSA video with Grammy-nominated rock en espanol band La Secta Allstar:

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) an estimated 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the United States each year. Victims are often lured into trafficking networks through false promises of good working conditions and high pay as domestic workers, factory and farm workers, nannies, waitresses, sales clerks, or models. Once in this country, many suffer extreme physical and mental abuse, including rape, sexual exploitation, torture, beatings, starvation, death threats, and threats to family members. It is believed that most victims who are trafficked are isolated and remain undetected by the public because 1) the strategies used by the perpetrators isolate victims and prevent them from coming forward, and 2) the public and the victim service providers have only recently become aware of this issue and may not be familiar with how to recognize or respond to trafficking victims.

To help stem human trafficking in the US, the Self Reliance Foundation is working with its media partner Hispanic Communications Network to design a Spanish-language public awareness campaign with support from the US Department of Justice – Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA).

This high-impact multimedia campaign is launching in early November 2009. The campaign will pilot in the Washington, DC metro area. Produced in Spanish, this effort will support local human trafficking programs and services, and also help to increase detection and reporting of cases of human trafficking among the local Spanish-speaking population.

To complement the media campaign, SRF will collaborate with the Hispanic-serving community and faith-based partners to disseminate the campaign’s public education materials, and implement interpersonal grassroots outreach efforts to engage “Good Samaritan” members of the greater Hispanic community in the campaign. Our strategy two-pronged strategy is designed to increase the number of community members who understand how to identify human trafficking victims, are aware of the purpose and services of the local service providers, and ultimately are willing to work with the these groups to identify and also rescue and assist human trafficking victims.

To learn more about human trafficking please visit the US Department of Justice’s Online Description.

SciGirls Outreach is a national educational television program of DragonflyTV, produced by Minnesota Public Television and supported by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation’s Program for Gender Equity. Since 2006, SciGirls Outreach has employed and disseminated the latest research and best practices around engaging girls in science, and has empowered youth organizations, science museums, educators and parents to deliver research-based hands-on STEM encouragement programs to girls in their communities.

To meet the dramatic changes in U.S. demographics and the need for more woman scientists and engineers, the project has expanded programming into Latino communities nationwide via the SciGirls en Espanol initiative working in collaboration with the Self Reliance Foundation.  SciGirls en Espanol provides Spanish-language print and video resources, leader training, and grants to nine existing Latina-serving organizations to help encourage greater engagement in STEM.

The SciGirls project encompasses an upcoming PBS TV show, a website, and a resource provider for educators, club leaders and mentors who are working with girls doing science. SciGirls outreach energizes club meetings, science camps, classes, and other events tailored for girls with DragonflyTV videos that feature girls doing authentic inquiry, along with exciting science activities based on these videos. SRF staffer Alicia Santiago helped select segments that would resonate with young Latinas, oversaw translations for video and print and helped provide insight on how SciGirls content could best serve the Latina community.  The production staff at KLCS TV (a noncommercial educational television station licensed to the Los Angeles Unified School District and a member PBS station) was instrumental in helping repackage individual SciGirls video, collaborating to develop a format that would best serve middle school Latinas and their families.

For more information, or to request review copies of SciGirl en Español materials, send an email to scigirls@tpt.org or visit the SciGirls website.

Acceso Hispano (an U.S.-based initiative of the Self Reliance Foundation) will soon be launching “El Cancer Nos Afecta a Todos” (Cancer Affects All of Us)– a national Spanish-language communications campaign financed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The campaign will reach Spanish-speaking Latinos through both mass media channels and grassroots outreach activities, and strengthen links between community-based service providers and Latino communities. Ultimately the campaign’s objective is to increase breast and colorectal cancer screening among Latinos and thereby decrease cancer mortality rates.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death among Latinos, but many of the cases could easily be prevented through routine screening and other preventive services.

In preparation for the campaign we are actively seeking to expand partnerships with community health service providers and cancer screening centers.  The campaign’s print, radio, Internet and text messages will build awareness of the importance of cancer screening, and encourage the public to contact our Linea de Ayuda (helpline) by phone or by email to find the location of their local cancer screening centers that provide bilingual or Latino-friendly services. In order to better serve the Latino community, Acceso Hispano is therefore building our database of relevant community health and cancer-related service providers.

If you or your organization provides health care services to Latinos or cancer-related services to the general public, please contact us! We can refer new clients to you, or help you identify the appropriate providers in your region so that you can refer your clients to cancer screening services. We will also be providing educational materials in Spanish related to various cancers and the importance of prevention that you can share with your community.

Why Focus on Cancer?
According to the research conducted by the American Cancer Society and the Intercultural Cancer Council, cancer is the second leading cause of death among Hispanic adults after heart disease. Hispanic women have two to three times the cervical cancer rates of non-Hispanic white women. Hispanic men and women have between 30-90% higher rates of stomach cancer than non-Hispanic populations. Lung cancer and breast cancer are the deadliest cancers among Hispanic men and Hispanic women, respectively.

Despite these alarming statistics, only 38% of Hispanic women age 40 and older regularly receive mammograms, and Hispanic women are less likely to receive regular pap smears than non-Hispanic white women. Deaths from breast and cervical cancers could easily be avoided if cancer screening rates increased among women at risk. Unfortunately, rates of preventive cancer screenings are proportionally linked to insurance coverage- the less insured an ethnic group is, the less likely they are to be screened. Latinos are the most likely of any ethnic in the United States to be under-insured due to a disproportionate lack of job-related insurance.

Furthermore, due to a lack of preventative screenings, Latinos have a disproportionately difficult time with cancer. According to the Volume 4 edition of the NCI Cancer Bulletin published in April 17, 2007, Hispanic women have significantly different experiences with breast cancer than non-Hispanic women do. The Hispanic women studied were diagnosed at a younger age; at a later stage of disease; with larger, higher grade tumors; and with less treatable estrogen- and progesterone-negative tumors, according to resports by Dr. A. Tyler Watlington and colleagues at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

Click here to download a brochure about the “El Cancer Nos Afecta a Todos” campaign.

ConCienciaNews.com is a project designed by SRF, developed and implemented in collaboration with Hispanic Communications Network (HCN), and financed by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

ConCiencia News is the first Spanish-language news service in the United States focused exclusively on health, science and environmental news.  SRF distributes news via ConCiencia free of cost to a diverse array of Hispanic media including 100+ newspapers and magazines, top Hispanic web portals, and almost 150 Spanish-language radio stations.  Each news story features original content developed by SRF journalists, and Hispanic reasearchers are often features to serve as role models for the public.

Why ConCiencia News Service?

The reduction of staff and consolidation of the media has left few resources for local Spanish-language media to offer scientific information to their Latino audiences.  Current studies reveal that Latinos score well below average in math and science in public schools, and are poorly represented in professions related to science and engineering.  To help address these challenges, SRF provides Hispanic media with a continuous source of high-quality scientific news adapted to the needs and interests of the Hispanic community.  This service increases the capacity of Spanish-language news agencies to offer better scientific content.

The market for Spanish-language news media in the United States is broad and growing.  Currently there are more than 1,500 Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. with a circulation of more than 42 million people, and 1,000 Spanish-language radio stations on the air around the country reaching millions of listeners each day.  In addition the Hispanic online presence is growing steadily.

ConCiencia News is supported by an Advisory Committee comprised of experts in the science field and members of the National Association for Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).

Click here to download a brochure about the ConCiencia News service.