By Ashley Wang, Nikita Waghani, and Lisa Wu
Data sources: Food for Free dataset, 2013 Annual Report
Video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8ab0z24hu3736b/Draw%20My%20Life.mp4?dl=0
The data say that the Food For Free program’s Home Delivery service serves 95 homebound Cambridge individuals in the year 2015, delivering fresh fruits and vegetables. One of these individuals, Johnice, relates how an accident forced him into an early retirement and made it difficult to carry groceries, putting him in a position of “food insecurity”. We wanted to tell this story because Johnice’s story resonated with us and really showed us how much of a positive impact this program had on people.
Our audience is the elderly and disabled Cambridge seniors who may want to learn more about Food for Free and their Home Delivery service. Our goals are to encourage these individuals to overcome the stigma of asking for help, and apply for the Food For Free program. Our original intent was to create a radio piece out of his story. Since our target audience isn’t extremely internet-savvy, we thought that this would be the best way to reach them. However, research shows that Facebook is also extremely popular for the over-50 demographic, and we decided to make a shareable video as well.
The result is a Draw-My-Life style video. This style of video was an extremely popular fad in 2013. In this type of video, the narrator talks about an event in their life, or their entire life, set to a fast-motion video of the author drawing illustrations on a whiteboard of key figures and events. We envision this video as part of a series of videos shared from the Food for Free Facebook page. For future work, we would draw stories from the 2013 Status Report, and improve the quality of the Draw-My-Life videos.