PSA

A healthy dose of community programming

by Theresa Flaherty

No matter what their background, their beliefs, or their language, all parents want their children to be safe, happy, and healthy. This month, WMPG begins airing public service announcements that will provide parents of children prenatal to 6 years with information about child health and safety issues. The PSAs, recorded in foreign languages, are aimed at four of Portland's immigrant communities.

Last spring, the radio station was awarded a grant of nearly $35,000 by Sound Partners for Community Health, which sought to fund health programming on public radio stations in partnership with a community health care organization. Longtime WMPG employee Rob Rosenthal and volunteer Kristina Truesdale were both interested in working with immigrant communities and saw the grant as an opportunity to reach out and provide a much-needed service. WMPG already airs a variety of ethnic programming, so foreign-language PSAs were not such a foreign idea.

"We're started with four [languages] because those are the languages already on WMPG: Somali, Spanish, Russian, and Khmer," says Rosenthal, the producer, who hopes to eventually add PSAs in Vietnamese and Serbo-Croat. After the grant was awarded, four language-based focus groups comprised of individuals from targeted communities were created to help identify topics of concern.

"We came up with a list of 12 topics and would get the group together," explains Rosenthal, "and ask them, `What do we need to do?' " Truesdale, a nurse, would then research and write the copy and get it translated through Catholic Charities of Maine. The focus groups would then offer advice, suggestions, or outright rejections of sections of the PSAs before they were recorded. In addition to being informative, Rosenthal had to make sure the announcements were culturally sensitive, and the focus groups helped him with nuances he said he never would have thought of.

Another thing Rosenthal learned was that while many child health issues are fundamental, the approaches of people from different cultures to the same problem could vary.

"To Russians, safety latches are a waste of money, they will find some other way to solve the problem," says Rosenthal. "That's an American way of solving the problem, buying something." And Americans could learn a few other things from their foreign counterparts. September's topic is nutrition.

"Immigrant parents want to protect their children from bad American eating habits. Foods here in the States are more sugary, and there is a lot of fast food," says Rosenthal. "They're telling us they have to watch out." Maureen Clancy, health promotions manager for the City of Portland's health and human service division, which WMPG is partnering with, says it is also a matter of adapting.

"They can't always find the foods they need; they have to adapt recipes," she says. "It's a lifestyle adjustment."

Although the original idea was to air the announcements only in foreign languages, Rosenthal says after listening to focus-group feedback they decided to do English as well.

The announcements will air twice weekly, during ethnic programming of the same language. Topics will change monthly, and upcoming topics include toy safety, poisons in the home, and the effects of second-hand smoke. They will run through August of 2001. Beyond that, Rosenthal can't say. However, "We definitely keep coming up with more topics," he says.