CHRONICLES:
JOURNALISTS & MEDIA MAKERS
Rise Up Be Heard: Imagine Health & Justice
Rise Up Be Heard: Watch Video Here
In Spring and Summer 2016, Civic Paths collaborated with Fusion's Rise Up Be Heard Fellows to explore how the civic imagination could inform these activists' and journalists' approaches to social change. As visions of the Fellows' aspirational future world emerged, we identified the following key themes:
Prisons - would be gone, prisons will have turned into universities
Labor - manual labor would be gone, automation of labor (but in a way that does not take away from employment).
Health - community based solutions, body scans to prevent disease, beaming into doctors office (to minimize barriers to doctor access), access to care universal (regardless of immigration status), universal access to medication, decolonizing medicine (eliminating control of medicine by big pharmaceutical companies), end of big pharma model
Education - based on sharing of information, shared technology (not just about having ipads in all schools), accurate history taught, crowdsourced curricula to reflect diverse stories/erased stories, adjustment of time in school to be effective for young people, culturally sensitive material, person to person based education, based on understanding young people’s learning needs, no standardized testing, higher education free and seen as just as the next step in educational process
Transportation - in hover cars that give off zero emission and do not impact environment
Environment - no car pollution, fewer industrial spaces, equity - clean air for everyone, clean water, everyone has a choice to access clean water and clean soil (does not depend on income)
Immigration - Fewer deportations, focus on dignity when dealing with immigration, no borders
Water - universal access to clean water, filtering of drinking water, making ocean water drinkable
Gender - end of gender binary, spectrum as a standard
The Fellows and Fusion then ran with these themes to develop the Rise Up Be Heard: Imagine Health and Justice campaign that elaborated and took action on 5 key themes that emerged from our workshop: health care for all, a future without prisons, end to health inequity, clean water for all, and full voter participation.
As Jacob Simas, Fusion's Program Manager, Social Impact, states:
"Writer and activist Walida Imarisha once wrote that, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction.”
In other words, imagination is a precursor to change, and we have to determine the kind of world we want before we can go out and build it.
So what kind of world do we aspire to?"
You can encounter the full campaign on Fusion's website.
