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Announcing the 2024 Nova Media Fellows

August 8, 2024

Building on the success of the Nova Media Fellowship’s inaugural year, we were pleased to receive a tremendous response to the second year’s call for proposals — nearly double the number of applications. We extend our heartfelt thanks to all of the terrific applicants, who impressed the selection committee with their passion, dedication, and diversity of ideas.

We’re thrilled to announce our 2024 cohort of Nova Media Fellows who will soon embark on ambitious, year-long fellowship projects that connect the dots between important health issues. This year, we are funding two full media fellowship awards and two partial media fellowship awards. 

Please join us in welcoming our new cohort:

Cynthia Greenlee, writer, historian, and editor, will investigate issues of reproductive justice and the maternal mortality crisis in the United States, particularly among Black communities (full fellowship).

Preeti Simran Sethi, multimedia journalist and educator, will explore the unique mental health challenges facing Asian Americans and highlight culturally responsive, identity-based approaches that foster resilience and well-being (full fellowship).

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Rowan Jacobsen, freelance science and environmental writer, will focus on our changing relationship with sunlight and its profound impact on human health and well-being, weaving together issues related to environmental justice, disease treatment and prevention, and urban design (partial fellowship).

Maria Parazo Rose, data analyst and reporter, will examine the ways Indigenous land dispossession acts as a threat to mental and physical health, especially in the context of climate change. Her project includes developing a public dataset to share her findings (partial fellowship).

“We initially intended to fund two Media Fellowships this year,” said Professor Berman. “But after seeing how well these four projects aligned with each other, and how they would shine a light on important, under-investigated health issues, we knew we had to support all of them.” We’re excited to support these outstanding journalists and look forward to the impact, insights, and discussions their projects will inspire. 

Launched in 2023, the Nova Media Fellows program aims to increase the number and quality of print, broadcast, and other media pieces that reflect a broad vision of health; are science-based; and accurately report on pertinent ideas, questions, and debates. Virginia Gewin, Lela Nargi, and Kate Morgan are Nova’s 2023 Media Fellows. Read about their projects here.

We offer our thanks to Nova’s Media Advisory Council, which has shared invaluable expertise to help shape the program and review Media Fellow applicants: Virginia Hubbell (Former Executive Director, Mental Insight Foundation), Jackie Judd (Former Vice President and Executive Producer of Multimedia, Kaiser Family Foundation), Jayne O’Donnell (Founder & CEO, Youthcast Media Group), John Schidlovsky (Founding Director, International Reporting Project) and Rich Stone (Senior Science Editor, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios).  
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Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.