Crossing Borders

Project Snapshot
A partnership between WMPG-FM and the City of Portland Public Health Division

Thousands of refugees from around the world have made homes in Portland, Maine, one of many United States cities designated as a resettlement location for the United Nations. The transition to American life can be isolating for refugees whose understanding of English is limited. WMPG and the City of Portland Public Health Division helped orient new Portland residents to local health services by creating public service announcements (PSAs) in English and four of the more than 30 native languages spoken in the area. The PSAs, developed with the help of these four ethnic groups, proved to be a powerful tool in connecting non-English speakers with health information and linking them to both familiar and new cultures.

The Crossing Borders PSAs covered 12 children’s health topics, airing weekly in each of the five languages. Announcements aired a total of 675 times over the course of the project. For its work on the series, WMPG was awarded First Place, Public Service Announcement, by the Maine Association of Broadcasters.

Crossing Borders submitted their PSAs to Healthy Roads Media. These materials are now available FREE in English, Spanish, and Somali from the Healthy Roads Media website.

Crossing Borders to Immigrant Health:
A First Person Report by Kristina Truesdale of WMPG-FM

I am a nurse. I work with people who need my help. I have worked in many different communities promoting health and wellness messages: on a reservation, with pregnant drug-addicted women, with children, with the imprisoned, with the under- and uninsured, with the overeducated. I try to answer their questions, listen to their concerns and provide information they both want and need.

I am also a community radio volunteer. I am a disc jockey, an engineer and a producer at WMPG. I create public service announcements (PSAs) at a radio station that serves those within our community whose voices often go unheard. WMPG is the only station in my area broadcasting foreign language programming.

Our community includes political and economic refugees from around the world, from Asia, Africa, South America and Eastern Europe. For the most part, these groups are easy to overlook. Certainly in the world of mainstream health care services they are invisible. But they exist.

A Russian woman might find her way to my clinic, a teenage couple from Vietnam, a Spanish-speaking grandmother. Maybe they brought along an interpreter—a twelve-year-old grandchild, a church leader, a teacher’s aid from their local school—or maybe they didn’t. The entire family might come to one person’s appointment. But they come few and far between.

My frustrations increased as I discovered there was no structure in place to provide health care outreach to these new populations. The language barriers and cultural differences were seen as insurmountable and costly obstacles.

When the opportunity arose at WMPG to produce multicultural health pieces, I naturally wanted to be involved. We produced monthly PSAs about pediatric health care. The messages were aimed at parents and caregivers of children ages zero to six. Recognizing that most caregivers will seek health care for children, if not for themselves, we hoped this approach would introduce listeners to health care services available for the whole family. The PSAs aired in English and four of the six most common languages spoken in my community: Somali, Cambodian, Spanish and Russian.

We organized focus groups made up of mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers and community leaders. The roles of the focus groups were to compile a list of health topics for the monthly PSAs, provide cultural contexts for these topics and review monthly scripts, editing the translations together. Focus group members all agreed that PSAs in native voices and native tongues would make it easier for their friends and neighbors who spoke English as a second language to understand.

Their input was essential because the messages had to reflect cultural differences we might not know or understand. Like when Somali participants suggested we cover the topic of dressing children appropriately for winter. Or when Cambodian participants told us they would never use safety gates to childproof homes because such barriers were for animals only—and signaled that a parent was not paying enough attention to the children.

During these discussions, focus group members asked many questions unrelated to our PSA topics. They asked questions for friends, family and neighbors. They had been stopped on the streets, in stores and at parties and asked specific health questions. This informal diffusion of information was an unintended benefit of the focus groups. It is what real community nursing is all about for me.

Focus group participants were clearly invested in the project. They felt ownership of the productions. They came to meetings ready to dissect the scripts, and offered invaluable insight. Even though it was challenging to work with groups of people who spoke different languages and had different cultural viewpoints on children and health care, it was a gratifying project for all the participants. They were proud of the work they were doing, and many were sad when the project ended.

Working with people from ethnic neighborhoods was, for me, a very rich and meaningful aspect of the project. I loved to learn about the places they left and hear their stories. I was often mesmerized by their tales and inspired by their experiences. They spoke to the resilient nature of the human heart as well as to one of the things that unites us all—laughter. I knew I had much more to learn from them.

Through both planned and unexpected means, we were able to provide valuable information to people challenged by language barriers and to build cultural bridges within our community. We witnessed just how powerful the dissemination of information really is. And we learned that it was well worth the community’s resources to invest in overcoming obstacles that seemed insurmountable.

Originally Published in Local Voices: Listening For Solutions.

Project Contacts

Contact Producer Rob Rosenthal 207-767-1702

Contact Producer Kristina Truesdale 207-846-4121

Project Media

Listen to the Healthy Roads Media Prenatal Audio PSA.

Download a PDF of the Healthy Roads Media Prenatal PSA.

Tags: community radio, PSAs, public health
Topics: Community Media, Education, Health Care, Language, Mental health, Outreach, Partnerships