Portland (Cedar Mill/Forest Heights)

The Power of Articulation: Turning Values into Political Messages
Using Value-Laden Language to Communicate about Health Reform 

A special one day workshop for leaders in health reform.

For too long, health reform leaders have been bogged down in policy-speak. That is, they have focused on policy minutae and failed to speak a language that connects with everyday Americans. This approach fails in the public arena, because the reality is that many Americans don’t have the interest or time to sift through the endless array of issues, personalities, and competing agendas in today’s political culture. As a result, individuals look for ways to simplify their intake and evaluation of information. One way that has become increasingly commonplace among citizens is to rely upon “cues” — that is, credible people or information that can be confidently used to guide decisions. The most politically potent cues, often, are core values and beliefs that unite Americans and inspire them.  

The bottom line is this: Progressives must become effective — much more effective — in identifying and communicating their core values in ways that are moral and culturally resonant. We call this articulation: the use of language in purposeful, everyday ways to create clear connections between guiding principles and social priorities. To do this is hard work — far harder than one might suspect. The approach we utilize is highly interactive and hands-on: Our goal is to help you identify and pursue your goals by clarifying and working through key ideas, issues, strategies, and concerns. We strive to merge our scholarly expertise with concrete, realistic, and applied understandings of contemporary politics and media.  

Proposed Workshop Agenda:

The Archimedes Movement is proud to sponsor a 6-hour workshop to help activists craft a purposeful language to communicate about the issues that are important to us.

The workshop will include elements of these steps:

• identifying central, over-arching principles that unite groups,
• creating powerful, engaging language that link these principles with your messaging,
• learning how the media serves as an “echo chamber” for political messages, and
• connecting these principles, language, and political messages into action plans.

David Domke, is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He worked as a journalist for several newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the Orange County Registerand Atlanta Journal-Constitution, before earning a Ph.D. in 1996. His research and teaching focus on how political leaders strategically craft their public communications and how news media and the public respond to these messages. His most recent book is The God Strategy: How Religion Became A Political Weapon in America, published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. In the last few years he has spoken about politics and news with academic, political, media, and public audiences around the country. In 2002 he received the University of Washington’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the university’s highest honor for teaching.  In 2006 he was named the Washington state Professor of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. And in spring 2008 he was selected as the favorite professor of the UW graduating class. 

Crispin Thurlow, also a professor in the Department of Communication, has an academic background in psychology and critical linguistics, and his work examines the ways that people use language and other forms of communication to negotiate their differences. Specifically, he is committed to understanding how relations of power and conceptions of privilege and inequality are sustained in everyday human interaction. His latest book is Talking Adolescence: Perspectives on Communication in the Teenage Years (Peter Lang, 2005). In 2007, he received the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award.

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To find out more please email Matt Webber at matt@wecandobetter.org.

Price: $16/$17 - Part of event proceeds will support The HeART of Healing project of the Archimedes Movement, a grassroots effort to spark positive health reform in Oregon and beyond. 

Halloween in a real mortuary? Vagabond Opera presents a night of haunting music, ritual, art and the sincere honoring of those passed in their second annual Halloween bash. Whether you want to dance, party, pray, or channel your ancestors, this night is for you. The night will feature belly dance, a stunning interactive altar installation dedicated to honoring the dead, an apothecary and museum of weird objects, a divination table and an ancient fire ritual in honor of Baba Yaga, the Slavic Witch! Come dressed as an ancestor or someone dead. Bring a photo or object for the alter and get ready to have some serious dead fun!

The premise of the HeART of Healing’s month-long engagement is to create a forum in which we will bring key members of the health and art community together to discuss how art and medicine are connected, and, more importantly, how we can incorporate these functionally innovative approaches for the next phases of health care development.

Simply put, the HeART of Healing project is designed as an informative, working model for the future of how art can help medicine. The HeART of Healing project has the potential to reshape health policy in Oregon so that the artistic community becomes an active element in discussions surrounding subsequent health-oriented infrastructures.

Oregon 3rd District Congressman David Wu will hold a town hall at Good Sam Hospital in Portland on Tuesday, August 11th.

Should you attend, please speak up and ask the congressman a question. Here are some possible talking points from which you might formulate your question:

We support comprehensive health reform that would accomplish the following:

• Every U.S. resident will have access to a clearly defined set of essential health services. 
• The Triple Aim will drive the design of the health care system, in that the health system demonstrates:
  • Improvement in the overall health of the defined population,
  • Reduced per-capita costs, and
  • Improvement in the individual patient experience in terms of clinical outcomes, patient safety and patient satisfaction.
• The business models within our health system must realign financial incentives to make them consistent with the Triple Aim.
• Prevention, health education, and wellness services will be provided and promoted.
• Disparities in access to an essential benefits package and subsequently health outcomes between people of different socioeconomic and demographic groups is not acceptable and therefore should be eliminated.
• The delivery system must be transformed to provide greater access to effective primary care and chronic disease management, while specialty care must be more effectively linked and integrated with primary care providers.
• Electronic Health Records should be developed and implemented to promote and support  evidence based decisions and improved efficiency of health care delivery.
• We must include development of a competitive publicly funded insurance option that gives Americans affordable and fair choice in how their insurance is purchased.
• We must explicitly acknowledge that public resources are finite. Therefore, public funds must be focused on providing the services which will cause the greatest improvement in population health. Many people may be able to purchase services that are more than those that are provided as part of the essential benefit package available to all residents and they should be allowed to do so. This is true of Medicare where close to 80% of Medicare beneficiaries have some type of supplemental coverage on top of their traditional Medicare benefit. However, the core benefit must provide a sufficient floor of essential benefits so that buying additional services is not absolutely necessary in order to achieve consistent positive health outcomes.

Hosted by SAFE: United for a Healthy Oregon, you're invited to a reception to celebrate Oregon's big step forward on health reform with the passage of HB 2009 and HB 2116. IF you have questions you can call Chris Coughlin at 503-312-8178.

Wear your WCDB t-shirt if you have one; if you don't have one let us know and Erick will get one to you for the next event! 

It has been off and on and off again, but it has been added to the Human Services Subcommittee agenda for Thursday at approximately 1:30. It's best to check and make sure before heading to Salem. 

You can check committee information at http://www.leg.state.or.us/comm/

Daily schedules are printed and can be found at http://www.leg.state.or.us/09reg/pubs/commsch.pdf