Oregon Impact Stories – 2019 Series

February 10, 2019

Forward Together is working to provide paid time off for all families, create safer communities, and make healthcare more accessible. Your life experiences are a powerful story that can help voters and lawmakers understand how these issues affect real people and inspire them to act.

Forward Together’s Impact Series has 3 steps:

  1. We meet with candidates for personal impact interviews to explain the project and answer initial questions.
  2. If it will be a good fit, we schedule time to meet at the interviewee’s convenience and film their story in response to prompts + impact questions.
  3. Our communications team will compile interviews from our 2019 participants. Each participant is welcome to a copy of their own interview.

How to know you are a good candidate for our Impact Series:

  • Everyone has a story to tell, yes, even you. You will be a good fit if you’re interested in sharing yours.
  • If you are interested in making sure every Oregon family can receive paid family leave in a critical time (ie. Terminal illness, new child, caring for aging family/ parents) and making sure you can benefit from that program too.
  • If you have prior experience being racially profiled or have witnessed racial profiling.
  • If you are a refugee, undocumented or immigrant and want to bring more awareness to the experiences you’ve had and/or barriers you’ve faced here in the US.

WANT TO SHARE YOUR STORY? Send an email to michele@forwardtogether.org to see if you qualify. 

Interview prompts/ Preview:

HEALTH CARE

Forward Together believes that everyone’s deserves to live in a healthy community. Everyone deserves access to health care, including the range of reproductive health services regardless of household income—this includes abortion.

In the interview we will prompt you with what a healthy community and access to care looks like to you.

FAMILY RECOGNITION

We all have connected family or networks we care deeply for beyond our blood relatives or the traditional definitions of family. In fact, over 79% of American families don’t fit the nuclear family model that public policy has used time and again to define who qualifies as a “family member” when we take sick day or long-term paid leave.

In the interview we will prompt you with questions about what an inclusive paid leave policy looks like to you. We’ll ask you to tell a story about yourself and what extended, chosen family networks look like in your life.

SAFE COMMUNITIES

Forward Together also works to ensure that our communities are resourced, supported and resilient, not locked up, targeted and criminalized. For many of us safe communities mean alternatives to policing, reformed gun laws, rejecting state-based violence and ensuring that activities of daily living don’t present barriers for undocumented folks.

In the interview we will prompt you with questions about what a world looks like to you that ensures our communities’ safety.

Key Dates & Next Steps:

January 21 – February 21st               Preliminary Interviews & Information

February 22 – March 15th                 Selection & scheduling process

March 18 – March 22nd                     Video/ Film interviews