Martine Hackett had been involved in New York City public health for many years before she moved to the Long Island suburb of Nassau County, so she knows the struggles people living in urban areas face when it comes to staying healthy. And like many, she thought those living in the suburbs didn’t face the same issues.
When looking at infant mortality rates for black women, however, she found it was higher in her new home than in the city. “I was surprised that my zip code was still a factor in suburbs,” said Hackett, an assistant professor of Health Professions at Hofstra University. “I really wanted to know what was going on.”
Suburban health equity was a subject no one was talking about and Hackett wanted to change that. Having a background in television, she knew that visual storytelling was a good way to address the issues. “Stories have a way of cutting through the misunderstanding and mistrust of statistics and connecting people’s lived experiences to other people who may recognize that they have similar experiences,” said Hackett.
Hackett worked with Creative Narrations/M.O.V.E., a program that helps communities gather their stories and combine them with the data maps on Community Commons. The project was supported through a grant from the Long Island Unitarian Universalist Fund and a Faculty Diversity Research Award.
“The motivation to use digital storytelling as a methodology to address health disparities was to tap into individual stories of how suburban spaces affect health directly and indirectly,” said Hackett. Combining map data with her gathered community stories had a powerful effect. “Putting these stories on maps that objectively showed the reality of the disparities in Nassau County was a way to address the heart and the head.”
Click on the map below to enter our interactive map environment and watch any of the video stories.
Maps like these visually tell the story of a community and its health.
Hackett’s long term goal is improve health. “We all want that, ” she stated, “but if we don’t acknowledge that suburban health is an issue, that’s a problem. It is an important step that we can’t fast forward through.”
Creative Narrations is a social change consulting firm specializing in multimedia support and training for non-profit and educational institutions. Mapping Our Voices for Equity is a grassroots community engagement strategy empowering communities to leverage digital stories and face-to-face organizing to influence policy, systems, and environmental change. MOVE was launched by a coalition of community-based organizations in King County, Washington, and its model is now being replicated throughout the country.
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