REFRAME YOUR LANGUAGE

Can you?

Everyday we use language that may be hurtful to others whether at school, Reframe work, or in the media. That is why One Step Away is joining with Resolve Philly’s Reframe Inititaitve. You can join too.

Your Language

FELON EX-CON EX-OFFENDER

reframed is

DRUG ADDICT reframed is HOMELESS PERSON reframed

REFRAME

Reframe is a new initiative to help communities have a voice in their communities and reporting. What do you want journalists to know or understand? Resolve Philly, a local media group, is developing a set of tools and resources that will help newsrooms use more accurate, inclusive language to describe our communities when reporting. We’re working with journalists, community leaders, educators, and industry-thought leaders to create tools that will work for journalists and, YOU, the community!

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Marginalized communities continue to feel be inaccurately depicted in the media. Language that promotes stereotypes, erases nuance, or highlights implicit bias is all too common in the news. Meanwhile, distrust of media organizations, political division, and industry upheaval run high. So we want to fix this! Have you lost trust in the media? Can it be restored? How?

WHAT’S THE PLAN?

One Step Away is part of a larger human services nonprofit, Resources for Human Development (RHD). In our nonprofit we strive to take a person-centered approach — i.e. they are experiencing homelessness vs. homeless people. We recognize that an individual is going through an experience, but that experience doesn’t define him/ her/them. So, we want to bring this concept to the mainstream media — to get journalists to understand, report, and write with a “person-centered” approach. For news organizations and journalists, we want to rebuild trust and forge genunine connections with our community. For community members, we want to cover topics that effect you and matter to you! How can we make a difference? To kick off our work, we’ve partnered with One Step Away, Resolve Philly, and Broke in Philly. Please start by taking our Community Investment Survey now! In Spring 2020, Resolve Philly will launch a pilot program with a handful of newsrooms that will put our tools and resources to the test. Throughout the pilot we’ll also evaluate how these language reframes changes how we interact with the media, journalists, reporting, audience, and overall trust in the process and partners.

HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED?

If you are a newsroom or journalist that wants to test our tools or contribute knowledge and expertise to this initiative please reach out to Aubrey Nagle at aubrey@resolvephilly.org. If you just want to stay in the loop about Reframe, sign up for our email list below. We’ll let you know about big news and other ways to get involve: resolvephilly. org/reframe. Or fill out the above boxes and send them to us on social media: @OSAphilly, our website: OSAphilly.org, or by mail: One Step Away, P.O. Box 637073, Philadelphia, PA 19147.