Building Bridges Update
Raising Climate Change Awareness Among Chinese Speaking Canadians
While global warming, climate change and the Kyoto Protocol are hot topics of debate among scientists and politicians, as often played out in the media, there has been far less information on these issues available to the Chinese community. Through our Building Bridges program, which aims to enhance multicultural community environmental capacity, West Coast took the lead in delivering a climate change social marketing campaign directed at Chinese speaking Canadians.
“This initiative was so effective because we engaged Chinese community organizations, surveyed opinion leaders, and focus group tested our materials to ensure that our messages were relevant and would resonate with community members,” says Multicultural Community Outreach Coordinator, Susanna Tam. “We worked with SUCCESS (the largest Chinese service agency), the Chinese Cultural Centre, and the Chinese Benevolent Association of Canada, among others. As well, close to 80 percent of our survey respondents reported that the environment is ‘very important’ to themselves and their families, which counters some prevailing stereotypes and speaks to the growing involvement of the Chinese community.”
Our Chinese climate change information was first published as a full-colour, four-page centre spread insert in the Ming Pao Daily News and Sing Tao Daily (the two largest Chinese language newspapers), reaching a readership estimated at almost 250,000. That information is now available in a full-colour, sixteen-page brochure. The brochure covers the science and impact of climate change, links to air pollution and health effects, and focuses on solutions and individual action. West Coast will distribute this brochure at community events, through multicultural community organizations, and through the BC Climate Exchange.
With recent figures showing 26 percent of residents of Vancouver with Chinese as their mother tongue, 33 percent in Richmond and 29 percent in Burnaby, West Coast hopes to continue to engage the Chinese-speaking community in meeting environmental information needs. For more information, see
www.wcel.org/chinese
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