Root Cause Collective

WOMEN’S FREEDOM CONFERENCE

SUN OCT 25 - 9AM - 9PM ET

The 2015 Women’s Freedom Conference, the first all-digital, online conference organized by and featuring women of color from around the world, will take place on Sunday, October 25, 2015.

This innovative conference will center and amplify the unique voices and experiences of underrepresented women who have been disenfranchised beyond gender alone– women of color whose identities are intersectional and whose womanhood is shaped and defined along those intersections. In partnership with Black Star Media, the Conference will usher in a new era of conferencing that provides more access to quality content to more people around the world.

“We at BSMdotCo are honored to partner with the inaugural Women’s Freedom Conference. As advocates for gender equity through the use of technology, we support the work of so many women that inspire us professionally and personally.” – Kortney Ziegler, PhD, co-founder, Black Star Media.

With over 25 dynamic speakers representing five continents, the Women’s Freedom Conference will center Women of Color– our success, our concerns, our work, our activism, and our existence as vital contributors to making the world a better place.

Our goals include providing practical, real-world information from a diverse group of women, many of whom are actively working to improve the lives of women of color around the world. We want to make this information available to as many people as possible and we believe that utilizing modern technology is the best way to do so. Participants will engage in conversations, seminars, and direct actions focused on the empowerment of women of color by building solidarity and promoting sisterhood.

Freddie Gray Shooting Exposes Lead Public Health Crisis

Games That Teach You Something About Public Health

By Beth Skwarecki (PLOS Blogs

Spent: This game is for anybody who feels like they know how they would live if they were poor. Just don’t buy as much stuff, right? The game, created by an ad agency for Urban MInistries of Durham, starts you off with $1000 in the bank and asks you to choose a job. From there, you have 30 days’ worth of expenses and decisions. You win if you can make it through the month without going broke. 

Vax

This is a short, fast-paced game that pits you against an infectious disease. Your playing field: a network of susceptible people.

You get a head start, with a limited number of vaccinations you can give before the disease starts to spread. When you vaccinate somebody, they drop out of the network, their dot disappearing and the network breaking apart. Once the outbreak begins, your only tool is quarantine, which likewise drops people out of the network.

Strategies that win: vaccinating (or quarantining) people who have the most connections, which has the biggest impact on the route the disease can travel. If you can completely split the network into pieces, that helps you too. But beware: When you reach the “hard” level, you’ll find that some people in the network refuse to be vaccinated. The game was developed by Marcel Salathe’s epidemiology research group.

Gut Check – This one was designed by microbiologist Jonathan Eisen. It’s a “real” game, the website says, but “one might accidentally learn about concepts such as antibiotic resistance, hospital-acquired infections, prebiotics, probiotics, opportunistic infections and more.”

In this card game (which regretfully I have not played yet), you and friends each try to develop your own microbiome, filling it with beneficial species—but you can also play pathogens on your opponents, pass around antibiotic resistance plasmids, and spread germs in crowded places with the “airplane trip” and “go to work sick” cards. There’s even a homeopathy card for those turns when you’d rather not play anything at all.

The game is available as free downloads to print, and the makers are working on a professionally printed version too.

Food advertising targeted to Hispanic youth - Report Summary

Food advertising targeted to Black youth - Report Summary