Partners and Cool Projects

Good Company/HelloCoolWorld.com Youth Projects

STAR IN YOUR OWN STORIES

Chee Mamuk means “new work” and comes from Chinook, a trade language used for communication between Europeans and First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Good Company has partnered with the Chee Mamuk program (part of the BC Centre Centre For Disease Control STD division) to develop the workshop series “Star in Your Own Stories.” Last year we worked with a group of Haisla Nation youth to create a youth-driven campaign to raise awareness around HIV/AIDS, STIs and healthy relationships. Their video was called “Stand True” and focused on the harm that rumours can cause in a small community. What are two things that can spread in a community? STIs and rumours! Since launching in March of last year the campaign has been getting around and their video has even won an award at an Aboriginal film festival.

This month we headed to Chemainus, BC to work with some First Nations youth from several bands to do another campaign. This time they focused on supporting each other to get tested for STIs and on where and how to get good info. This new campaign will launch in January. Watch for it! Check their website YouthHaveThePower.com for updates and info.

Good Company’s methods are to work with youth to create a campaign which will be meaningful for them. The challenge always is to address root causes of the problems we are working to prevent, while creating strength-based positive messages that will be effective in prevention work. We bring media professionals together with the youth, so that they get support to bring their ideas to life in video, photographs, graphics and online. We partner with organizations like Chee Mamuk who are content experts and have a commitment to working with communities. We work with youth as the experts of their own experiences. Together we develop the messaging and create cool innovative campaigns that re-present the youth back to their communities as heroes to their peers. We try, wherever possible, to integrate social marketing best-practices into our projects and to develop ways to track and measure our successes.

SUPER POWER PROJECT

This project is a partnership with WAVAW (Women Against Violence Against Women). We were fortunate to receive a Partners in Prevention Grant from the BC Ministry of Community Services. This allowed us to do more workshop series in Kitamaat Village and also in Vancouver with the goal of launching an integrated youth-driven campaign online this February. This time, we are repeating the workshop methods we developed around the HIV/AIDS awareness but addressing some of the root causes of sexualized violence, namely gender stereotypes. We are looking at issues of power, how stereotypes lead to violence, and how “busting” those tired old ideas can give us new ways to encourage positive “peer power.” In addition we will have the opportunity to play with webby ideas like “peer to peer’ (P2P) and explore how we can use this concept to make our campaign spread virally on and offline.

VANCOUVER'S TROUBLED DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE SITE OF SACRED SMUDGE CEREMONY

The troubled Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver is tragically a location infamous for missing and murdered women. It’s also where the Good Company/HelloCoolWorld.com offices are located. And it’s also part of Squamish Nation Traditional Territory. As all eyes are on the area in the rush towards the 2010 Olympics, many people want to clean things up. Sadly that often means just hiding the problem. But others have more healing efforts in mind. We want to honour our friend, client and project partner WAVAW (Women Against Violence Against Women) as they plan a special ceremony to bring hope to the ’hood.

“It is a time to honour Clan Mothers as leaders and sacred life givers, and pray for an end to violence against all women,” says says Singing Thunderbird Child/Twice Standing Women (Darla Laughlin) Aboriginal Outreach Counselor for WAVAW. “Within this section of Vancouver which is no bigger than one square kilometre, women have silently disappeared, been kidnapped and murdered. The women living here are exposed to acts of violence on a daily basis.”

From the Medicine Wheel’s Sacred Directions of East, South, West and North, Aboriginal Elders will lead a smudge and say prayers along four city blocks in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The ceremony will be followed by a procession of community members representing the four races (yellow, black, red and white). Elders of the 4 directions will then come together on the corners of Hastings and Main. Here, in the heart of the city, with traditional song, dance and drumming, prayers for peace, healing and safety for all women will be offered.

Says Laughlin, “This ceremony will cleanse the negative energy from this troubled area so that the healing process can begin.”