The Voices Project is set to launch in early 2013
The Voices Project is an ambitious, never-before-seen advocacy campaign seeking to advance global tuberculosis (TB) education, funding, support, and research by leveraging the collective power of an individual voice.
Based on Visual Epidemiology’s award-winning film, They Go to Die, focusing on TB and HIV in the southern African mining industry, the pilot Project will link together the stories of hundreds of miners affected by TB throughout all of southern Africa. Using GPS signaling and a novel web-based entry platform, the stories will become dynamic – updated in real time and linked together on an interactive map using an algorithm based on key words. Instead of focusing on the disease, stories will celebrate the lives of the miners – their children, their hobbies, their sense of humor – showing the people behind the numbers we know so well in the epidemic.
Once the Project is launched, individuals from around the world can join into the network and share their stories, which will become linked to the global network using the same algorithms based on the common threads of the stories. By design the project will expand beyond the issue of mining and become a global community connecting the hundreds of patients, researchers, advocates, and other individuals associated with the epidemic.
Coupled with strategic education and social mobilization campaigns, the Voices Project will be a driving force in the continued fight against the global TB.
The Voices Project pilot is funded by the Fledgling Fund’s Creative Media Initiative.
