Abriendo las Cajas (Opening Boxes)

Project Summary

Abriendo las Cajas (Opening Boxes) seeks to reduce incidences of domestic violence amongst the Latin American immigrant population in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland, and to provide a safe and empowering space for youth, men, and women of this community to share their experiences with their families, community, and general public. The partnership will address systemic violence in the Fruitvale community through the power of digital storytelling. Request a DVD and curriculum guide.

The digital storytelling campaign will take family members through a progression of self-expression, peer sharing, and family healing to community empowerment and change. Participants will produce tangible products (digital stories) that will be put to immediate use by a statewide network of health educators as well as be distributed via local radio and the Web. In the second year, participants will be invited to participate in a larger intergenerational media project.

Project status

In the first year of the project (2008), twenty participants (two groups of adults and one group of youth) participated in small-group storytelling programs co-facilitated by health and media instructors.  A DVD collection of digital stories with a curriculum guide in English and Spanish is available free to non-profit organizations and schools.  In the program's second year (2009), participants will create one larger, collaborative intergenerational media project.