NEW HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, filmmaker-author-educator Crystal R. Emery is taking the lead with her Connecticut-based nonprofit, URU The Right to Be, Inc. (URU), in bringing accurate information to communities of color with Our Humanity. An innovative public health media movement, Our Humanity sees URU working in partnership with nearly 30 U.S. organizations to provide Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities with key messaging on the novel coronavirus and related topics from people who look like them in an era when mistruths and misinformation are running rampant, costing lives. With participants including actor Keith David, tech innovator Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders and more, Our Humanity aims to bring COVID infection and mortality rates down through infographics, video messages, community organizing and partnership building, and Instagram Live conversations.
Our Humanity helps build strong communal networks through which people can unite to inform and care for one another in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. In this vein, the initiative, working in conjunction with First Calvary Baptist Church of New Haven, is also committed to the founding of learning hubs across the nation to provide students forced into remote learning with a safe environment, Wi-Fi and other needed tools.
Emery, a longtime healthcare and STEM advocate, founded Our Humanity because she knows first-hand the urgent need for outreach to BIPOC communities, among the hardest hit by the COVID pandemic. The director of Black Women in Medicine, Emery is an African American who is also a quadriplegic living with two chronic diseases. The coronavirus’s assault on communities of color, whose members often are essential workers — where Indigenous, Black and Latinx people have a mortality rate from COVID-19 more than three times greater than their white counterparts — has made the need for her work critical.
“So much of the response to COVID-19 has proven that if we don’t save ourselves, nobody else will,” said Emery. “It is imperative that our communities, which have been devastated by the pandemic yet remain ignored, join forces to create solutions and increase knowledge about the disease.”
Our Humanity sees BIPOC experts and other advocates speaking directly to their peers, in their own languages and on their own terms about pandemic-related issues including stress management during COVID-19 and how to navigate the need to listen to medical experts in light of longstanding distrust of them due to historic mistreatment in BIPOC communities.
Video messages and interviews from individuals including actress Cynda Williams, deaf advocate Brandon Ruiz-Williams, engineer Sandra Begay and more can be viewed at urutherighttobe.org/our-humanity-video-and-files or on Instagram at @urutherighttobe. IG Live interviews featuring Emery and special guests are held weekly on Wednesdays at 12 p.m. EST.
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SOURCE URU The Right to Be, Inc.
