Community Voices

Seven months ago, the Greater Chicago Study Center (GCSC) embarked on a journey to engage our community partners to find out their thoughts and opinions about children’s health and the National Children’s Study (NCS). First, we asked community partners to recommend local parents active in their communities through volunteering, PTA, school council or other activities. We asked these parents to be GCSC Neighborhood Ambassadors and help advocate for the Study in their local communities.  For the next few weeks, we gathered as a group and gained knowledge and skills in filmmaking and interviewing. If you followed our postings on this blog between October 2011 and February 2012, you were able to see some of the progress that we made in reaching out to individuals all around Cook County. It quickly became evident that the time spent conducting these interviews about our children’s health concerns constituted a rewarding experience for all.

Since February, we have been very busy reviewing the many hours of footage filmed by our Neighborhood Ambassadors in an effort to distill them into concise informational videos. We learned much about some of the main health concerns shared by communities about Cook County children, including asthma, obesity, and diabetes. Some parents shared their personal stories regarding their own children being afflicted by some of these conditions. Additionally, local residents declared their excitement about the NCS because the Study is going to take a closer look at the environment where children are growing up and its relationship to children’s well-being. In fact, the holistic approach to environment, as well as the length and size of the Study, is what distinguishes the NCS from other studies. All of the people whom we approached were eager to express their support for the NCS because they understand its tremendous potential to improve the health of future generations.

After months of hard work, the GCSC is proud to launch Community Voices, two awareness campaign videos in English and Spanish as the result of our VideoVoice project:

We would love to hear your comments about the videos. Please click here to answer a short survey about the video.

As you can imagine, many interesting interviews did not make it into this final set of videos. Check back here next week, as we will post some of them for you.

As part of our mission at the Greater Chicago Study Center, we are committed to addressing issues related to health and well-being of children and their families. We thank you for helping us ensure the success of the National Children’s Study in Cook County.