The YCP Direct program incorporates the latest technology into the pantry’s daily operations. Clients can now order their groceries off-site and at their convenience through the YCP website. Using the YCP Direct program, clients choose from nutritious food options and select a pick-up time to reduce congestion in the pantry on pick-up days.

The flagship Choice Pantry program utilizes web-enabled tablets on-site that allow clients to place a custom order and pick up the same day. In this program, clients are assisted by volunteers in choosing from a menu of pantry options by viewing images and script in a chosen language. By encouraging clients to become active participants in the selection and ordering process, YCP remains true to its mission to promote client dignity and independence.

YCP served over 2 million meals to New Yorkers last year, distributes grocery packages to over 1,200 needy families each week, and is designed to meet the needs of New York families by providing culturally appropriate and nutritionally balanced food. Camino Public Relations is proud to support YCP and their efforts to expand access to the pantry.

View more videos at: http://nbcnewyork.com.

It is imperative that we recognize cyberbullying for what it is – a symptom of the larger problem of relational aggression.

-       Teenager Dominique Napolitano, Girl Scouts USA

I’ve been trying to remember the first time I was bullied at school.  Experts say bullying starts in about the second grade but my memory only takes me back to seventh grade when a girl on the spirit squad decided that she would beat me up for thinking I was all that on the cheerleading squad.  It was such a lopsided fight that she made a bully appointment, deciding on Monday that she’d “whoop” my “sorry a—“ on Friday after she finished eating her lunch.

I didn’t tell my Mom about the threat but I recalled a story she told about a girl getting her earrings ripped out during a fight in her high school.  And, she said bullies don’t like to pick on confident people. So on Friday I went to school without earrings, made a point of enjoying my lunch, then confidently walked with purpose toward the girl and said something like “come on, let’s do this.”

We didn’t fight, the pom pom bully ended up saying “naw, whatever.”  Words plus attitude beat fists.  I wonder if we had played out this scene online, like the Facebook generation often does today, would my words have carried the day?

Three years ago Rep. Carolyn Maloney tried to pass “Safe Schools” federal legislation that directed schools to do something about bullying. At that time she reported “24% of students ages 12 to 18 reported having been bullied in schools in the last 6 months.”   That legislation proposed surveys that assessed the safety of schools by measuring, among other factors “student self-discipline and tolerance for others, and students’ care and respect for one another and their mutual cooperation.”  Rep. Maloney’s efforts generated scant attention.

That was before “cyberbullying” and “sexting” hit the headlines. In 2008 there were just 42 mentions of “sexting” in the media, and since then there have been well over 5,000 mentions including every major media outlet, reaching an audience of tens of millions. In the wake of high profile tragic teen stories with a sexting or cyber-bullying component, Congress, state lawmakers, and even the Supreme Court have been weighing in on the practice.

Last month Rep. Maloney held a congressional hearing on cyberbullying and sexting, where experts urged lawmakers to include a cyberbullying component when they reauthorize the No Child Left Behind legislation (ESEA) later this year.   This time everyone from Dr. Phil to the Girl Scouts was in the room.  Rep. Maloney isn’t alone – the majority of states have been wrestling with cyberbullying, most notably related to sexting concerns.  The most recent action occurred Monday when Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a new law that makes “sexting” among minors a misdemeanor.

While elected officials and educators are trying to stem adolescent sexting, pop culture media continues to witness the normalization of sexting. This week’s issue of US magazine reports on its Hollywood scandal pages that a “Bachelorette” contestant’s “sexting” emails were sent to TMZ for worldwide broadcast.  From Lindsay Lohan to Vanessa Hudgens, young stars are frequently in the sexting news. A recent London-based poll concluded that one in five adults in the U.K. have engaged in “sending racy texts or picture messages.”  In pop culture, sexting is either flirtatious or scandalous, akin to infidelity.  Pop culture doesn’t treat sexting among adults like a crime.  When the Supreme Court ruled on a sexting case last month the issue was never about sexting itself being criminal, but the proceedings focused on whether an employee could use a work-issued phone for personal use. In contrast, it is rare to find a media mention of sexting among teens that is treated as appropriate flirtation.  There’s a major disconnect between the sexting and cyber-harassment conversation in popular culture, and related conversations about adolescents among educators, pundits, and parents.

At the Maloney congressional hearing some advocates proposed that the Safe Schools Improvement Act (H.R. 2262), be part of the reauthorization of ESEA.  This would define “violence” to include “bullying and harassment”, and create a federal grants program for antibullying and harassment programs.  The legislation is sponsored by Rep. Loretta Sanchez, is supported by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network and has a long list of Congressional co-sponsors and educational endorsements.

My favorite testimony at the Maloney hearing came from teenager Dominique Napolitano.  She was the only witness that focused her remarks on emotional and social bullying in what she described as “relational aggression.”   Ms. Napolitano described relational aggression as “behaviors that harm someone by damaging, threatening, or manipulating her relationship with her peers, or by injuring a girl’s feeling of social acceptance.”  She was testifying on behalf of the Girl Scouts, whose research showed that “nearly half of girls defined safety as not having their feelings hurt,” and that “girls’ number one concern was fear of being teased or made fun of.”

There isn’t much conversation about the root causes of harassing and malicious behavior among adolescents, which is what makes Ms. Napolitano’s testimony stand out.  The public discourse virtually never mentions sexuality education as a potential point of prevention, despite the common use of sexualized and homophobic slurs in sexting and cyberbullying.  Instead the focus is squarely on the technology (monitor your kids computer time) and punishment (should this be a misdemeanor or a felony?).

While state lawmakers help educators figure out the discipline side of the equation, lawmakers like Rep. Maloney and Rep. Loretta Sanchez are focusing on the school climate piece.  How do we create “respect” among students?

Many organizations and educators have been doing just that in school districts nationwide. For example, Scenarios USA is an organization that helps promote tolerance and respect in schools through student writing and filmmaking projects.  Scenarios’ recent work focused on themes of masculinity.  During a break in the filming of a script about sexual orientation, two male students sat on a picnic table and talked.

Teen 1: “If we don’t like something, that’s ‘gay’, that’s ‘gay’, that’s what we use a lot.”

Teen 2: “I mean, ‘gay’ is a term that we use a lot.  And it’s funny,

(Pause)

Teen 2: “…but when you think about it, it’s not really funny.”

Teen 1” “Exactly.”

Teen 2: “At times I notice that we say something like that and we don’t realize that it could be hurtin somebody.”

Cyberbullying and malicious sexting are social problems more than they are a technology challenge.  Bullying, sexism, homophobia and stigma have long been a tradition in the hallways and schoolyards of schools nationwide.  Now that some of that bullying has spilled out of the hallway and into the public eye it’s harder to ignore. While leaders rightly scramble to protect bullying victims from the glare of the Internet spotlight, it’s refreshing to also see some organizations and policymakers taking on the root social issues that perpetuate the underlying bias at play.

The “PR Play of the Week” – as designated by PR Week’s Tonya Garcia – was awarded to the pirates earlier this month. In fact, the PR Play Rating was “ingenious”, which beat the “savvy” rating that myself and colleagues received a few years ago for our Free EC promotion. Professional jealousy aside, the pirate public relations campaign showcases the value of publicity even for the most profound uphill reputation battles. In this case the “pirates” attempted to reposition themselves as something like a “coast guard.”

Pirate spokesman Sugule Ali called the New York Times from a satellite phone on a Ukrainian cargo ship that he and his co-pirates had hijacked. Ali’s message was that his group was interested only in money, not the $30 million in weapons onboard that put an international spotlight on the robbery. He tried to move his reputation from piracy (translated as “sea bandit” in his region) to the expected actions of a coast guard patrolling its waters. Ali is awarded kudos from PR week for normalizing the pirate experience and downgrading the international alarm: “We just saw a big ship, so we stopped it.”

Here are the partial transcripts from Ali’s interview:

Q. Have the pirates been misunderstood? ?A. We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits [”sea bandit” is one way Somalis translate the English word pirate]. We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.
Q. Why did you want to become a pirate??A. We are patrolling our seas. This is a normal thing for people to do in their regions.
Q. Isn’t what you are doing a crime? Holding people at gunpoint??A. If you hold hostage innocent people, that’s a crime. If you hold hostage people who are doing illegal activities, like waste dumping or fishing, that is not a crime.
Q. What has this Ukrainian ship done that was a crime? ?
A. To go through our waters carrying all these weapons without permission.
Q. What is the name of your group? How many ships have you hijacked before??
A. I won’t say how many ships we have hijacked. I won’t talk about that. Our name is the Central Region Coast Guard.

Ali may not view himself as a pirate, but piracy is rooted in the tradition of taking direct action for the good of the disenfranchised.

I had suspected that pirates were overly caricatured after taking my son to the nation’s only pirate museum last July. Displayed among the torture devices used by and on pirates were descriptions about their socialist tendencies. The pirates, according to the museum, were motivated by a combination of socialism (the wealth ought to be distributed evenly among the people) and political democracy (Royalty should not impose taxes, etc). The museum notes that they were also violent, lawless, and cruel – but in some cases no more so than the governments they were opposing. It seems clear that some pirates were motivated to challenge the greed and corruption of monarchy, but it seems also clear that many, after having “stolen back” the people’s wealth, failed to share the loot.

The pirate museum is located in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where a sunken pirate ship was recovered a few decades ago. John F Kennedy Jr among other wealthy adventurers backed the exploration. Apparently the ship’s captain had foolishly pushed ahead during a bad storm because he was anxious to meet up with a Provincetown girlfriend. This all happened very close to the site where the pilgrims had first landed. The pilgrims found Provincetown to be so grim that they re-boarded and proclaimed their official landing to be their second stop, Plymouth Rock. Now Provincetown is a gay-friendly artist colony where flocks of tourists meander up and down its main drag, watching comedy and buying t-shirts.

At the pirate museum kids were eager to buy fake eye patches and plastic swords. Ali’s world of “piracy” is far from Provincetown’s caricature. When asked if he was fearful of the escalating international standoff, he said, “We’re not afraid of arrest or death or any of these things. For us, hunger is our enemy.”

I am far from expert about the battles off the coast of Somalia. But I can see why PR week was intrigued by Ali’s efforts. Adding nuance and a storyline to this international crisis was profoundly impactful public relations.

Check out the video here:

Her story is a reminder of the real-life impact of immigration on women and families, voices that are often overshadowed in the policy debates and heated rhetoric.

Immigrant women make up more than half of the nation’s immigrant population, and, according to New America Media are increasingly becoming the breadwinners and primary caretakers for their families. And the U.S. Census Bureau reports that women are often the ones to initiate the citizenship process for their spouse and children.

Yet, there has been little to no gender perspective within immigration reform debates. It’s as if women’s concerns and needs are an afterthought, if a thought at all, in policy circles and the media.

Immigrant women face unique challenges. Gender biased visa requirements make them dependent on a male partner’s visa to remain in the country. Immigrant women detained for alleged violations have been known to endure extreme physical and emotional abuse, such as during labor and delivery. And fearful of documentation questions, too often immigrant women, particularly Latinas, forego reproductive health care and put their lives at risk. Latinas have the second highest cervical cancer mortality rate.

To challenge the traditional immigration perspective and stereotypes, Camino PR has been working with the National Coalition for Immigrant Women’s Rights (NCIWR) to develop communications strategies and messaging that inserts the voices and demands of immigrant women in immigration reform debates.

Led by three leading national advocacy organizations– the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health— and comprised of grassroots groups from across the country, NCIWR has called on the Obama administration and policy makers to create family-friendly immigration policies, health care reforms, and labor protections on behalf of immigrant women as part of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

And it’s clear that this work is needed. Camino PR worked with NCIWR to develop messages and signs for the national immigration march held in Washington, D.C. in late March. The messages elevated the conversation from policy wonk to fundamental human rights: a woman’s right to dignity and to family.

According to NCIWR, “within minutes of setting up a sign distribution station on the National Mall, women, men and families were flocking to our tables to take signs. Even among the tens of thousands of signs being waved, ours could be glimpsed in some media coverage. We heard many “thank you’s” and “it’s about time” from women on the mall who were so grateful that their unique needs were being recognized.”

The drumbeat for immigrant women’s rights is beginning thanks to NCIWR. It’s about time.

Camino client Yorkville Common Pantry (YCP) provides millions of groceries and meals each year as the largest single site for alleviating hunger in New York. But the YCP mission is not only to provide emergency food for a family, it is also to provide the realistic and compassionate care that families need to move out of poverty. Check out this video of Halana Richardson talking about YCP– it’s worth taking a few minutes to hear her story to understand the complexity of hunger in America.

As the job market worsens, YCP estimates that it will have a sharp increase of 19% in the number of people who face hunger in the coming year. Camino PR’s Andrea Hagelgans and Pablo Toledo went to YCP to help them tell their story to NBC News for a special on hunger in America. Here’s a behind-the-scenes clip of the filming.

Behind The Scenes with The Yorkville Common Pantry from Camino PR on Vimeo.

YCP is New York City’s unique provider of assistance to the hungry, including providing more groceries and meals at a single site than any other program, and helping people become more economically stable by offering assistance with obtaining food stamps and housing, preparing for employment with basic services like showers and job counseling, among other practical and compassionate services. They even provide cooking classes to make help people eat healthy and stretch food stamp dollars. Camino PR was thrilled to partner with a community organization that takes a holistic and compassionate approach to hunger.

YCP won the prestigious Robin Hood Heroes award this month, which includes a $50,000 grant. That’s a huge honor, but more donations are needed to meet the skyrocketing need for basic food assistance. According to Stephen Grimaldi, executive director of YCP, “in this dismal economic climate many families throughout New York City face a bare table. Families of all means should be able to celebrate the holidays without choosing between paying rent or buying food.”

This holiday season consider supporting Yorkville Common Pantry or local food banks in your area.

We can learn a lot by studying the communications strategies of Mexican health advocates, who a few years ago defied all odds and legalized first trimester abortion in Mexico City. “We didn’t take the streets, we took the media”, observed Maria Luisa Sanchez Fuentes, one of the primary leaders of the Mexican legalization movement.

We recently sat down with Sanchez Fuentes when she was an honored guest speaker at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health gala. We asked her to talk about what communications strategies broke through the political and religious barriers that had thwarted efforts for decades to legalize abortion anywhere in Mexico. GIRE, the national Mexican organization headed by Sanchez Fuentes, has a long road ahead to further liberalize legal access to abortion in Mexico. The political and legal backlash to the Mexico City gains in other Mexican localities have been severe. But what is clear is that GIRE and their allies are walking down a different message road than U.S.-based abortion supporters, and creating public support for legal abortion within a very different values context.

You can watch the interview with Sanchez Fuentes here.

The first thing that might surprise you is the amount of support that exists for legal abortion among Mexicans. In the United States, the conventional wisdom often is that Mexicans on both sides of the border are guided by Catholic doctrine on abortion. While the influence of Catholic leadership must be seriously considered, this blanket assumption needs another look. A recent poll by the Mexican government found that 62% of Mexicans say they “don’t believe the government should intervene in a woman’s right to choose.” In Mexico City, a poll commissioned by the Population Council found that 66% of residents “thought the city’s decriminalization laws signaled a step forward for the country”. In media interviews, Catholic leaders in Mexico bemoaned the practice of Catholics straying from church doctrine and warned healthcare providers that they will go to hell for providing abortion. In what may be a sign of Catholics separating their decisions on abortion from their religious beliefs, one Catholic abortion provider in Mexico City said she may end up going to hell, but not for providing abortion care.

Recent polls in the United States show some movement in public opinion among Latinos, but more research is needed to fully understand the real views of this demographic. Pew’s latest poll on abortion attitudes found that “while whites have become significantly more pro-life, the movement among Hispanics has been primarily into the undecided camp”.

Sanchez Fuentes described what has – and what has not – been effective in abortion messaging among Mexicans. Their best message focused on the decision, and who had the right to make it. This dialogue was grounded in human rights language, connecting human values to the decision-making process. Rather than focusing on an individualistic perspective, such as the interruption of a life plan, their messages focused on the complexity of the decision, such as when and how to start a family. They took on opponents with a messaging campaign about “life” and “family” taking ownership of the complexity of those concepts.

These message strategies are in synch with a recent worldwide survey of attitudes about human rights. Mexico led the world in support for women’s right to have full equality compared to men as well as the desire to have government play a larger role in preventing discrimination against women. In contrast, respondents in the U.S. strongly endorsed the concept of gender equality but did not favor greater government efforts to achieve equality. A survey of attitudes is a great distance from lived realities, but it may demonstrate an opportunity to center reproductive health access in a human rights message model.

Sanchez Fuentes suggests that U.S. and Mexican movement leaders come together to learn from each other. A cross-border summit on messaging and reproductive health could, among other things, help us deepen our understanding of promoting a values-based discussion in political climates that are deeply impacted by religious doctrine. As Mexico lurches forward in liberalizing abortion access while the United States teeters on the edge of backsliding, such a cross-border convening could be a powerful strategic investment.

Our basement office was once a stable for the work-horses that carted baked goods through Manhattan. In the first weeks we hauled out debris and installed large bamboo mats and oversized desks to create a comfortable but frugal workspace. We sanitized everything, but still I was so convinced that rats and roaches would make their appearance that my mother shipped us a diaper-genie type trash can that tightly seals any evidence of food. I was wrong to be afraid, only two living creatures emerged: a horse fly that periodically buzzed through the office like a Blue Angel air show, and a gigantic wasp that spontaneously reproduced and then flew away. I don’t know why the wasp visited, but I believe our supersize fly held the spirit of horse flies past, reminding us to recognize those things upon which we build our future.

Our carriage house was the kind of office where you could sketch on the wall and spill paint on the floor. One day Woody Allen and Larry David showed up and turned the carriage house into a temporary movie set. Many Tuesdays we ended the day with creative hour, when Tomas and Sean would practice guitar and Mary would bring in a bag of sweets from the Donut Pub.

But there were downsides too. It’s the kind of office that makes you worried about getting your nice suit dusty from crumbling pillars. The air was stale and smelled vaguely of horses, despite our abundance of aromatherapy and the constant whir of the air purifier. The original window and door could not be sealed, and on frigid days the narrow stone stairwell created a wind tunnel that swept directly into our meeting area. Cell phones sputtered as if we were in a bunker and every evening we wrapped our computers in colorful silk scarves to prevent them from taking in too much dust.

“We aren’t a typical corporate office” Loretta often says, words I soothe myself with when we are doing other-duties-as-assigned like pouring animal-friendly salt on the icy stone steps. I have known many lovely typical corporate offices but we’ll always be a little quirky, like our carriage house roots. We have moved just two blocks. We now work on the floors above a poster store that houses the largest collection of movie posters in the world. Oversized double doors in our top floor open onto a large wooden deck that gives us a rooftop view of Chelsea.

After working hard underground we are taking in deep breaths of fresh air. I am grateful for our roots and for the friends who give us momentum. Goodbye first Camino home. Thank you and goodbye, ghost fly.

Senator Kennedy voted against the nomination of John Roberts as Supreme Court Chief Justice because he was not convinced that Roberts fundamentally understood the role of civil rights and equal rights in this country. Further, he didn’t believe that Roberts would be a leader in this country’s march toward equality. Kennedy’s unfavorable opinion about Roberts was heavily influenced by Robert’s comments about the role of judicial leadership during the Brown v Board of Education decision, when most white Americans were in favor of segregation.

Like Kennedy, last month Senator Graham raised the issue of Brown v Board of Education during a Supreme Court nomination hearing. This time it was Judge Sonia Sotomayor under scrutiny. Senator Graham asked Sotomayor about judicial leadership and the Brown v Board of Education decision. Graham explained to Sotomayor that had he been a Senator at the time of the Brown decision, he probably wouldn’t have been “brave” enough to stand up to segregation like the Justices did. In contrast to Kennedy, Senator Graham expresses a very different view of leadership and its responsibility to civil rights.

Kennedy became a Senator on the heels of the Brown decision and he was a forceful leader in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. After 11 failed attempts, the civil rights legislation finally passed.

Kennedy was right to judge the qualification for leadership through the prism of civil rights and equal rights. He is missed.