Framing in action on one of the nation’s worst public health crises

From “Stop The Stink” to Healing Border Communities

Resource Media joined forces with a new grassroots coalition in San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, to mobilize around one of the worst public health crises in the nation: the extremely polluted Tijuana River. The complaints voiced by residents of predominantly Latine and low-income communities in the Tijuana River Valley and along the Pacific coastline about asthma attacks, headaches, and respiratory and digestive illnesses caused by the River’s pollution were largely ignored, dismissed, and gaslighted by government officials. Resource Media helped advocates reframe the issue, from a nuisance and NIMBY message of “stop the stink,” into a severe public health harm caused by the sewage, trash, and industrial factory pollutants in the water and the air.

To create urgency for policy solutions without playing into problematic anti-Mexican rhetoric, we guided the coalition to clarify its bedrock values of healing, community, the outdoors, and nature; and to unite around an advocacy communications strategy of “fix, prevent, heal.”

Resource Media equipped the Tijuana River Coalition with bilingual English-Spanish strategic communications infrastructure including core messaging, template press materials, a centralized media contracts list, and press clips tracking system. With one-to-one media skills coaching, we helped doctors, scientists, youth leaders, and Latine community advocates strengthen their skills as spokespeople for the coalition. Our in-house press secretaries doubled down on PR efforts; securing interviews, OpEds, quotes, and mentions of the coalition in dozens of media articles that shifted the overall narrative towards community health. This communications strategy, in tandem with critical organizing work by the coalition, has ultimately contributed to $250 million in federal funding for wastewater treatment and a new MOU between the U.S. and Mexican governments to address the Tijuana River pollution crisis.