Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shared its review of Healthy People 2010. The report shared that as a Nation, we had met or were moving toward meeting, 71% of the disease prevention and health promotion objectives we set in 2000.
Despite this, the data also underscored the need for improvement in a number of critical areas, including health disparities and obesity rates. These two issues, as well as other key indicators of health, are top priorities of Healthy People 2020 (disclaimer: client).
“…Addressing health disparities continues to be our greatest challenge,” said Dr. Edward Sondik, Ph.D., director of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). “…All Americans should be concerned that disparities among people from socially, economically or environmentally disadvantaged backgrounds have generally remained unchanged.”
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The October issue of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Bulletin is packed full of information on social determinants of health–including examples of work in progress and insights gained from around the world.
“Yes, there is a greater than 40-year spread in life expectancy among countries and dramatic social gradients in health within countries,” said Michael Marmot of University College London in his editorial. “But the evidence suggests that we can make great progress towards closing the health gap by improving, as the [World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health] put it, the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.”
The bulletin includes another editorial that highlights potential solutions to improving the social determinants of health, as well as a number of research articles and relevant news.
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What are the Occupy Wall Street protests all about? Author Geoff Livingston describes its as a “groundswell of economic injustice.” Playing a role behind the scenes in economic and social injustice are social determinants of health and health disparities. Perhaps it’s time to bring them to the forefront.
The October issue of Health Affairs presents an agenda on fighting disparities. In it, Dr. Howard Koh, Assistant Secretary for HHS, discusses a key part of this agenda, HHS’ National Action Plan to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities. Analysis and commentary on how health reform may impact health disparities is also provided. What might be most surprising is that one research study included in the issue, shares that only 59% of Americans are even aware that health disparities exist!
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Meanwhile, our friends in Canada may be one step ahead. According to a recent study and as reported in BET, “blacks are equally healthy as their white counterparts.” BET went on to say:
“Thomas A. LaVeist, a co-author of the study and director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions in Baltimore says that he believes America’s history of treating Blacks as second-class citizens plays a large role in the Black-white health disparity that exists in the U.S.”
As a heads up, LaVeist also cautions taking the results at their surface as the the results could have significant limitations because the survey included just 729 Blacks, compared with more than 280,000 whites reported BET.
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LaVeist also published another study about how place–and not necessarily race–contributes to health disparities. The study, based on a neighborhood in Baltimore composed equally of whites and blacks, found that within the integrated community, health disparities all but disappear. This suggests that as a Nation, we’ve been looking for answers on how to improve health the wrong way. Instead, we should be looking at what’s going on in certain communities that what’s going on within certain populations. As quoted in the Atlantic:
“Solutions to health disparities are likely to be found in broader societal policy and policy that is not necessarily what we would think of as health policy,” LaVeist says. “It’s housing policy, zoning policy, it’s policy that shapes the characteristics of communities.”
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flickr credit: woodleywonderworks
]]>Last night, Debra Askanase of Community Organizer 2.0 tweeted that she was working on a blog post highlighting blogs to read in 2011. In her tweet, she asked for people to share their own recommendations. I shared the following:
In response, Debra asked me: What are two blogs that get you thinking? Two of the blogs I followed-up with are:
Now it’s your turn–In the comments, name two blogs that get you thinking. This way, we can give our RSS readers a refresh for 2011.
]]>This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell‘s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.
Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.
Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.
Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.
Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.
You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.
You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.
Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.
You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)
The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.
It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.
For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.
Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.
Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.
As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.
Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.
If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.
Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.
In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.
Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.
The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter.
This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.
]]>People like Amy Sample Ward, Britt Bravo, Geoff Livingston, Nancy Schwartz, Stacey Monk and others. And yesterday, my own post from last October on the “Cool Factor About Mobile” was also cross-posted on Beth’s blog. To me, this experiment has blossomed with success. It’s added color to our blogosphere, raised voices and increased the camaraderie of the folks in this space.
So, thank you Beth Kanter, not only for the opportunity to share in your space, but also for trying out this guest posting experiment. Look forward to your shared insights and revelations this series has generated (*Tip: If you haven’t checked out Beth’s blog yet, I highly encourage it.)
What do you think? What are your thoughts about guest posting? Stay tuned for tomorrow’s “Guest Posting Part Duex” as another guest post experiment is revealed.
flickr credit: LeeLeFever
]]>“To my heroes in business and in life – thank you for teaching me that if you never stop learning and believe in yourself, great things are possible. You have made more of a difference than you could ever imagine. I owe you a lifetime of gratitude.
- My employer and my boss – who I continue to admire and learn from everyday.
- My graduate professor Fritz Cropp who allowed me flexibility in my graduate research scope, the tools and knowledge to bring it together, and believed in the vision I set before myself. Plus, he reminded to live a little every now and then.
- My friend Lacey, for without you, I know I would not have survived the practical joys (and challenges) that come along with moving from Kansas to Washington D.C.
- All the amazing, social media, social marketing and non-profit minds that exist within the blogosphere, Twitter…it is you all who propel the conversation and demand more of us practitioners everyday, and I love every minute.
- To the new friends I’ve made, you rock. You are solid, supportive, and good people.
- To my beloved fiance, I love you. Each and every day. Who would imagine we’d go from running hurdles on the track together to fast forward, living our dream in Washington, D.C.
- And finally, my parents. Words cannot express. At the very least, thank you for teaching me to 1) always believe in your dreams and 2) always believe in working hard to achieve them. And that along the way, you can never be too gracious.
With that, I hope this Carnival session encourages you to share the love. Extend a hand. And tell someone the difference they’ve made in your life.
Do you know anyone else who deserves a moment? Tell us about them. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a person. This edition of the carnival asks submitters to “Give Thanks!” by taking a moment and sharing the tools, resources, mentors, etc. that you appreciate.
This is your opportunity to give a shout-out. Even if it’s a quick e-mail blurb, all messages of gratefulness will be shared.
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Theme: “Give thanks! Tell us which tools, resources, menotrs, etc. have aided you or what you are thankful for this past year.”
Deadline: Monday, November 17, Midnight
To Submit: Submit your permalink to npc.carnival@yahoo.com or use the BlogCarnival submission form. If you are sending to Yahoo directly, please include the edition date in your subject line.
]]>The posts listed below largely discuss and point to current nonprofit marketing trends and potentially future marketing trends. Though this might not reflect social marketing per say, it is a reflection of social change….how trends surface, alter, flourish, downsize and in essence, change. So enjoy this week’s carnival!
Thanks for tuning in to this week’s carnival. Thank you for all of the submission’s this week, as I’ve found new blogs and bloggers to follow, along with some great ideas about cha-cha-chaaaange!
Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival feed.
]]>The Carnival for Non-Profit Consultants will be hosted here at SocialButterfly next week, June 16th. This carnival was originally started by Kivi Leroux Miller over at Nonprofit Communications. Today, the carnival is hosted by a different leading nonprofit and social change blogger each week.
This is my first shot at being a host for the Carnival, so I’m looking forward to reading your submissions. This week is an open call, course, I am privy to social marketing– and social change-related topics.
To submit to the carnival:
Deadline is Midnight, Friday, June 6th.
See you at the Carnival next week…right next to the giant, potatoe sack slide…that’s always been my favorite ride! =)
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