Seed Grant
Beyond Declarations California is a pilot project for how to link public policy that reframes racism as a public health crisis to recently-collected public health data and participatory hyper-local storytelling and journalism. As of June 8, 2021, 32 California jurisdictions have officially declared racism a public health crisis, joining a growing movement across the U.S. Using the film, Cooked: Survival By Zip Code as a narrative and dialogue-inspiring centerpiece, we will gather public health experts, journalists, community members, frontline organizations, and policymakers to explore and report on aggregated death-by-racism and “life expectancy gap” data that is tied to on-the-ground experience and the stories of residents, community anchor institutions, and mutual aid efforts. The goal: Inspire cross-discipline community dialogue and journalism that rebrands and reframes community-led, grassroots organizations that have been striving to dismantle and transform the systemic, man-made, slow-motion disaster of structural racism, into critical forms of disaster response and preparedness.
