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The campaign has had a major impact on some of the people involved.

Andrew Vai, a Youth Speaks poet, says that he has had multiple families members die of heart attacks when he didn’t know what diabetes was. Now he is running and exercising more often because of his newfound awareness.

Jamie D Wolf, a facilitator/film-maker says the month he was asked to facilitate the writing workshop, his uncle died from diabetes.

Many people involved have personal experiences with diabetes, including family members who have died.

Videos have received thousands of views on YouTube and the campaign has gotten lots of press coverage in national and local publications

The campaign has educated over 2400 public Bay Area high school students, 40 youth poet mentors and over 800 stakeholders about the social factors that affect the rising Type 2 diabetes crisis.

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Setting is relatable:

Filming connects what she’s saying with the food she’s talking about

Filming focuses on Erica’s body, especially her face, and her reaction to it:

Erica’s speaking technique is emotionally affecting

Her words are powerful and focused

Filming also shows the consequences of diabetes

Videos are bright and engagingly filmed, but they also provide information

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Raised in the neighborhood of Fillmore in San Francisco, Erica McMath Sheppard comes from a large family in which the majority is battling diabetes. She is the living statistic of the type 2 diabetes epidemic affecting low-income communities of color. She comes straight from the so-called vulnerable communities that exist in neighborhoods labeled "food deserts" where exercising in public parks is not an option because the streets are prone to violence and crime.

As a Youth Speaks poet, Erica uses poetry to articulate her daily stress and living condition, as it relates to poverty, leading her to self-destructing eating behaviors and a battle with obesity. Her poem originally titled "Feen" helped catapult her to first place in the Bay Area Teen Poetry Slam and a spot in the HBO Documentary Brave New Voices. Erica provides a raw, lived perspective (and also acknowledgement of complicity) from the voice of a teenager as she describes, "knowing most of your family has diabetes but you're still smackin' on Sour Patch Kids while walking your auntie to her dialysis appointment."

The night Erica was crowned Grand Slam Champion in 2010 for her poetic performance, Dr. Dean Schillinger, founder of the UCSF's Center for Vulnerable Populations, happened to be in the audience. Stunned by the power of her performance, he was inspired to team up with Youth Speaks to develop short films with spoken word poetry about type 2 diabetes and the environmental factors affecting youth. This collaborative project grew into what we now call The Bigger Picture.

I, along with about a dozen of local Youth Speaks poets, stepped into a ten-week workshop with Dean, which began with an in-depth history, analysis, and education on type 2 diabetes. We learned the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes, how to use a lancet (and what a lancet was), and how type 2 diabetes is a preventable disease that overwhelmingly affects low-income communities of color. Through this process, the key facts that stood out to us were incorporated as bookends to our Bigger Picture films.

To put this into perspective for us, Dean placed us in the seat of an unknown hospital waiting room, handing us basic sugar-level tests to find out if we were pre-diabetic. Something none of us ever wanted to discover but it forced me to analyze the dietary decisions I was making, and the neighborhood in which I was making them; this lead to me to write and produce THE CORNER, inspired by the intersection of 14th and Jackson in Downtown Oakland.

At Youth Speaks we take great pride in using art as a weapon for social change, believing that youth have to be at the center of any conversation that involves their betterment and empowerment. Erica's poem was truly the driving inspiration and example of the collaboration between Youth Speaks and UCSF's Center for Vulnerable Populations. Not surprisingly, Erica's poem was turned into a short film " Death Recipe", produced and directed by acclaimed filmmaker Jamie DeWolf. "Death Recipe" was shot in Erica's home in San Francisco, with her mother making a cameo in the film itself. The film was accepted and featured in the inaugural Food & Farms Film Festival at the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco.

Since 2010, the project has produced thirteen short films that flip the motif of the traditional this-is-your-brains-on-drugs Public Service Announcement to high-quality poetry-laced short films that deliver unapologetic cautionary tales about the type 2 diabetes epidemic. These films, directed by Jamie DeWolf and Dimitri Moore respectively, have garnered national attention throughout social media.

We wrapped up 2013 with our first bilingual videos on sugar-sweetened beverages with an accompanying Spanish-language website for Latinos, one of the communities most affected by the disease. This year, the Bigger Picture is poised for a larger statewide rollout throughout California, notably in Richmond and Stockton. We just produced two new films about soda and its high contributions to the type 2 diabetes epidemic: "Good Soldiers" by Gabriel Cortez and "Targets" by Oakland youth poet laureate, Obasi Davis. They will be released in the coming months so stay tuned.

If you would like to get involved and help change the conversation about diabetes to make young adults more conscious about the environmental and social factors that cause the spread of this disease, here's how you can help:

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How Youth Are Using Poetry To Change The Conversation About Diabetes

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Raised in the neighborhood of Fillmore in San Francisco, Erica McMath Sheppard comes from a large family in which the majority is battling diabetes. She is the living statistic of the type 2 diabetes epidemic affecting low-income communities of color.

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When Erica first created this poem, in 2010 she was crowned Grand Slam Champion for her poetic performance (where she met Dr. Dean Schillinger).

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2012 - The Bigger Picture Campaign - "Death Recipe" by Erica

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As a primary-care physician, he witnessed the rise in Type 2 diabetes among his patients, especially children and adolescents. He wanted to use his work on public health literacy to confront problems like diabetes in communities.

He was inspired to co-found The Bigger Picture Campaign at a Youth Speaks event where he heard Erica Sheppard McMath perform her poem “Death Recipe.”

He hoped that pieces like Erica’s would transform the way that young people
relate to food, as part of a larger effort to address the stress and trauma of youth.

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Dr. Dean Schillinger, founding director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations

Professor and physician at University of California in San Francisco (UCSF)

Director of Health Communications Program at UCSF

His work focuses on literacy, health communication, and chronic disease prevention and management

Has received numerous honors including:

2013 Everett M. Rogers Award from the American Public Health Association

2016 James Irvine Leadership Award

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After taking graduate level writing classes James Kass created Youth Speaks to provide a space for young people in marginalized targeted environments to find their voice.

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James Kass, founder and executive director of Youth Speaks

Widely known author, speaker and curator

Heavily involved in spoken-word programming for youth

Has received awards from organizations including:

Ford Foundation

National Endowment for the Arts

California Arts Council

First ever White House Poetry Jam !

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Youth Speaks Mission
“Through the intersection of arts education and youth development practices, civic engagement strategies, and high quality artistic presentation, Youth Speaks creates safe spaces that challenge young people to find, develop, publicly present, and apply their voices as creators of positive societal change.”

UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations Mission

“to carry out innovative research to prevent and treat chronic disease in populations for whom social conditions often conspire to both promote chronic disease and make its management more challenging.”

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The Bigger Picture Campaign has received support, sponsorship, and funding from government organizations, nonprofits, charitable foundations and individuals.

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The Bigger Picture is a collaboration between the CENTER FOR VULNERABLE POPULATIONS and YOUTH SPEAKS to end Type 2 diabetes in young people. The Bigger Picture empowers youth to raise their voices to change the conversation about Type 2 diabetes by exposing and working to change the social and environmental factors that have led to its spread. The campaign has educated over 2400 public Bay Area high school students, 40 youth poet mentors and over 800 stakeholders about the social factors that affect the rising Type 2 diabetes crisis.

The Bigger Picture has garnered national attention, including a feature on the homepage of The Huffington Post, over 1 million video views, recognition on Upworthy.com and the Food Farms Films Festival, as well as special presentations at the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine Public Health Literacy Roundtable, the National Soda Summit and the James Beard conference. The campaign's most distinguished national awards include the APHA Spirit of 1848 award for best video linking social justice to health, the UCSF 2014 Excellence in Partnership Award, the Real Food Media 2015 Grand Prize, the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California's Young Champion for Latino Health award and most recently best short film in the Youth category at the 2015 Sacramento Food Film Festival.

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The Bigger Picture is a collaboration between the CENTER FOR VULNERABLE POPULATIONS and YOUTH SPEAKS to end Type 2 diabetes in young people. The Bigger Picture empowers youth to raise their voices to change the conversation about Type 2 diabetes by exposing and working to change the social and environmental factors that have led to its spread.

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The Bigger Picture Campaign (BPC) is a collaboration between James Kass, the founder of Youth Speaks and Dr. Dean Schillinger from the Center for Vulnerable Populations.

Art education and health literacy

“The Bigger Picture empowers youth to raise their voices to change the conversation about Type 2 diabetes by exposing and working to change the social and environmental factors that have led to its spread.”

The Bigger Picture has garnered national attention and won multiple national awards due to its strategies to make a change. These strategies include writing workshops, short films, school assembles and outreach events and educators toolkit.

(BPC) is a collaboration between James Kass, the founder of Youth Speaks and Dr. Dean Schillinger from the Center for Vulnerable Populations.

Art education and health literacy

“The Bigger Picture empowers youth to raise their voices to change the conversation about Type 2 diabetes by exposing and working to change the social and environmental factors that have led to its spread.”

The Bigger Picture has garnered national attention and won multiple national awards due to its strategies to make a change. These strategies include writing workshops, short films, school assembles and outreach events and educators toolkit.

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The youth diabetes epidemic is facilitated by advertisers.

Food products are advertised heavily to children and adolescents.

In 2006, the Federal Trade Commision reported that the 44 companies it surveyed spent over 1.6 billion dollars marketing to children and adolescents.

Today nearly 14% of children ages 2-5, 19% of children ages 6-11, and about 17% of adolescents ages 12-19 are overweight.

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Diabetes is a rapidly rising global health epidemic

In 1950 worldwide, 100 million obese people and in 2010 worldwide, 500 million obese.

Worldwide, the total number of people with diabetes is projected to rise from 171 million in 2000 to 366 million in 2030.

Diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in 2015, with type 2 diabetes accounting for 90% to 95% of all cases

In 2015, 23.4 million people (almost 10% of the U.S. population) had diagnosed diabetes, compared to only 1.6 million in 1958. Within these numbers, 132,000 children and adolescents younger than age 18 years have also been diagnosed with diabetes.

In "Behind The Scenes" with Dr. Dean Schillinger, he stated that diabetes was once thought of as “Grandma and Grandpa’s” disease but this new statistic suggests an epidemic amongst the youth population in the U.S.

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“If you are what you eat but you don’t know what your eating, then you don’t know what you are” wise words from Youth Speaks poet, Robin Black.

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Changing the Conversation About Diabetes

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Changing the Conversation About Diabetes

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Through this presentation you will learn about a social activist group called "The Bigger Picture" that empowers youth to speak out against type 2 diabetes and why this is important today.