BMSG worked with the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence to better understand how teen dating violence is portrayed in the news and what the implications are for prevention policy.
This project, funded by The California Endowment, equipped the field with the language and skills needed to more effectively communicate about childhood trauma; trained a new breed of online journalists to tell stories using that language; and gave advocates the tools to transform systems that may compound, rather than mitigate, the traumas children experience.
The Advertising Story set out to find out how the Ad Council’s obesity prevention messages compared with other messages from food and beverage companies and what context those messages would appear in.
BMSG and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) coordinate the Food Marketing Workgroup, a network of more than 200 organizations and academic experts in the U.S. who are concerned about the proliferation of marketing of unhealthful foods and beverages that targets children and adolescents.
BMSG conducted a study to help Healthy Eating Research (HER), a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, understand how news coverage portrayed a 2013 proposal to tax soda in Telluride, Colorado, so that future ballot initiatives might better anticipate what to expect when SSB taxes are presented to local voters.
BMSG worked with the National Association of County and City Health Officials on its project with the CDC’s Center for Injury Prevention and Control titled the Roots of Health Inequity: Synthesizing a Knowledge Base for Practice. BMSG synthesized the literature and developed a series of reports to explain health inequity and its root causes.
To make health equity and racial justice a reality, we must change the narratives that justify and perpetuate inequitable policies and systems. Berkeley Media Studies Group is excited to be part of a Consortium of practitioners across multiple disciplines working to understand, address, and shift mindsets that are reinforcing structural racism — a barrier to health equity — so we can achieve equitable health and well-being.
Berkeley Media Studies Group provided media advocacy support between December 2015 and January 2016 for the Urban Peace Movement (UPM), an organization dedicated to a model of youth development known as “Healing Centered Youth Organizing,” through which young people have the opportunity to heal from the negative effects of social trauma and community disinvestment by becoming engaged as agents of social change.
Like other public health issues, violence is preventable, but, in numerous cities, policies that emphasize prevention are in short supply. That’s because many citizens and leaders don’t believe preventing violence is possible, and even if they want to try, they don’t know how. This is partly because the public’s understanding of violence, beyond personal experience, comes through the filter of what gets reported in news coverage.
For 10 years, we helped consult and coach members of numerous community organizations funded to do grassroots violence prevention projects, the youth served by those organizations, violence prevention researchers, academic fellows, community fellows and state policy advocates.
