SRF’s discovery of the positive and transformational impact of media in the 1970’s shaped the model that we use today.  At a time when rural Native American and Hispanic residents of New Mexico were just being introduced to television for the first time, there were no role models on Hollywood’s screens that reflected their lives and realities.  The images they were seeing only served to diminish self-esteem and provoke exodus to poor living conditions in the cities, where youth believed they could also have a chance at the new-found “American dream.”  SRF helped villagers to create documentaries that reflected their lives, and their role models.  They were trained to use media as a tool to define their own cultural identities and integrate the changes that they wanted-within their own cultural context.  Using media in this way, they were able to share their visions with other community members, promote dialogue, and learn from each other.

SRF’s first documentaries provided a voice for these communities to speak in their own words and from their own cultural contexts, and share their knowledge with each other.  The documentaries demonstrated organic farming techniques and traditional systems of irrigation, preservation, and marketing of food.  Students built solar greenhouses, cultivated their own produce, and learned to measure energy savings while honing their practical mathematics and science skills.  Not only did these documentaries strengthen cultural pride, they offered a culturally appropriate and self-reliant alternative to the powerful market forces of the new era of consumerism sweeping across the United States.

This strategy proved to be powerful and transformational. The early SRF spot “Death Rider” won recognition for prevention of drunk driving, and our “How to Build a Solar House” was named the Energy Education film of the year. SRF’s early campaign, “Don’t cut off the hand that feeds you” demonstrating how the poaching of nut-bearing pinyon trees was deforesting woodlands surrounding ancestral Native and Hispanic American villages pushed citizens to change their behavior and government agencies to change their policies. Experience gained through this early work grew into our four-part SRF model that continues to be used successfully today.

In 1982 Jeff Kline, founder of SRF, went on to create Hispanic Radio Network (HRN) in an effort to reach Hispanic communities beyond New Mexico with educational messages.  Working closely with HRN and other organizations, SRF continued to perfect our model for reaching underserved communities with educational information regarding health, education, science, social justic, civic engagement, the environment, and other issues.  In 1996, Maite Arce founded SRF’s toll-free Information & Referral Service to link radio listeners to service providers in their communities who offered relevant support services. To date this bilingual hotline has helped over 100,000 callers identify scholarships for college, enroll in English classes, receive affordable health care services, find refuge in shelters for battered women, avoid the dangers of gang violence, or improve their lives in many other ways.

SRF projects have since expanded beyond radio to print media, television, Internet, and now mobile phone texting services.  Since 2000, Self Reliance Foundation has handled the major national campaigns to address issues affecting the U.S. Hispanic community such as gang violence, gun safety, childhood obesity, cancer prevention, credit issues, human trafficking, English proficiency and immigration procedures.  Sponsors have included the U.S. Departments of Justice, Agriculture and State; the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as numerous private foundations including Ford, Hewlett, Buffet, Sloan, Surdna, Packard, Turner, Summit, Compton, and the Education Foundation of America.

We continue to work in the United States, Latin America (including South America and the Caribbean) and have expanded our reach into the Middle East.  To learn more about our current programs, please visit the What We Do section of our site and our Recent Projects posts.