The Elgin Community Network’s January Elgin Alive! program on January 17, 2012 will kick the new year off with a very special preview presentation of the upcoming PBS film series, De-signing Healthy Communities, in which Elgin is featured. The presentation will take place at Gail Borden Public Library, at 6:30 p.m. in the Community Rooms A-B-C on the first floor. This special preview will be presented by Harry Wiland, CEO of the Media Policy Center who produced and directed the film. The event is sponsored by Media Policy Center, ECN, U-46, ECCO, Gail Borden Library and the City of Elgin. For more information please call 847-429-4680.
Dr. Richard Jackson, head of Environmental Sciences at UCLA, is Host and Narrator of the se-ries. The film series includes four one-hour segments that look at the different impacts our built environment has on our key public health indices—obesity, diabetes, heart, asthma, cancer and depression.
Elgin, Illinois is featured in the second segment, entitled “Rebuilding Places of the Heart”, fea-tured as a community that was left to redefine itself after industry and manufacturing collapsed. Dr. Jackson said “You have to have diversity of housing and services when you rebuild so it is economically cost effective, and Elgin is working on that.” Leading the way to a greener, more sustainable future, Elgin High students and teacher Deb Perryman, are featured.
Designing Healthy Communities looks at many places where we live, work, study and play and suggests they look the way they do because we have not assessed in advance the public health consequences of policy decisions. Dr. Jackson’s conclusion: For the first time in our nation’s history, we are subtracting years of life from our children because of the chronic diseases of obesity, asthma, and diabetes.
Funding was provided for the project by the following foundations: Kresge, Cal Endowment, AIA, W.K.Kellogg, Marisla, Kaiser Permanente, the Gifford and other Syracuse foundations, and Robert Wood Johnson.
About Dr. Richard Jackson: He is Professor and Chair of the Department of the Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA School of Public Health. Prior, he was Chief Public Health Officer in the State of California; for nine years, he was Director of the National Center for Environmen-tal Health at the CDC in Atlanta. Dr. Jackson was recently inducted into the Institute of Medi-cine, one of the highest honors a doctor can receive. He has spoken as a keynote at hundreds of conferences globally, including for royalty in London, at the Vatican, and at the White House. Dr. Jackson is the only medical doctor elected to the Board of the American Institute of Archi-tects. (Dr. Jackson is available for interviews.)
Creative Production Team: The multiple media project, produced and directed over the past three years by the Media Policy Center’s Co-CEOs, Harry Wiland and Dale Bell, and Writ-er/Producer/Editor Beverly Baroff, consists of Interactive Website platform for Social Media, Academic Curriculum & Symposium, Community Engagement, Televised Town Hall Meetings, Companion Book published by Wiley Press and APHA, and a Video Resource Library.