Peter Klein

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has demonstrated the inability of global supply chains to meet a surge in demand for vital medical equipment, limiting the effectiveness of containment efforts, and increasing morbidity and mortality. The UBC Global Reporting Centre’s Broken Chains project is critically investigating how the outsourcing and consolidation of healthcare manufacturing, just-in-time delivery, and a lack of preparation by governments, made medical supply chains incapable of meeting the demands of a pandemic.  Our research has revealed that medical supply chain breakdowns are exacerbating inequities between the global North-South divide. This virtual roundtable will interrogate how the global inequity of our medical supply chain model has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, employing South Africa as an illustrative case study. There is growing evidence that South Africa cannot outbid developed countries for scarce medical supplies. The country’s unanticipated inability to procure medical supplies during a global pandemic undermined the effectiveness of emergency planning that surpassed most developed countries.

Principal Investigator: Prof. Peter Klein, School of Journalism, UBC

Partners: Mr. W. Greenland, A New Day Men’s Healing Program; Tree of Peace Friendship Centre

Turning Points is a crowd-sourced digital portal for individuals coping with alcohol dependence. Through a mobile and desktop platform, people from Indigenous communities across the Canadian Arctic can connect, share their experiences, and tap into storytelling traditions that have been used to connect and heal people for centuries. Ultimately, Indigenous Peoples in remote communities across the Arctic, who have been disenfranchised and without adequate resources to address alcohol dependence, will now have voices and access to a shared community that they can turn to for support when facing challenges, for encouragement towards positive change, and for reassurance that they are not alone in their experiences. The project is led by UBC faculty Prof. Peter Klein and Dr. John Oliffe in collaboration with William Greenland, an Indigenous counsellor from the Gwich’in First Nation.

Project update – January 2020
The Turning Points project has produced eight video shorts. Each story touches on a different success or challenge related to alcohol dependence in Indigenous communities in the Northwest Territories. Each story was co-created with a local storyteller – an approach that aligns with national-level strategies and priorities for media and research identified by Indigenous nations across Canada – in particular recommendations 22, 84 and 85 put forward by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In developing this project, our interdisciplinary team merged traditional arts-based research methods with journalism to develop an innovative model called empowerment journalism. Our team is made up of interdisciplinary researchers (ethics, education, journalism and population and public health), professional journalists and community members. The key challenges being addressed through this Wall Solutions award centre on historic shortcomings by researchers and journalists when working in Indigenous communities – especially around challenging topics such as alcohol use, addiction, residential school and violence. Doing so meant making Indigenous ownership over data central to our research ethics, privileging the voices and narratives of local storytellers and giving back to the communities we work in.

The Turning Points video series will be completed by the end of 2019. In 2020 the project team will focus on KT events and publication. Along with a multimedia website, our team has begun reaching out to media outlets and identifying avenues for publication, including film festivals, radio shows, digital media publishers, educational distribution platforms, and social media. Our public launch will consist of two community screening events, one in Yellowknife (February 2020) and one in Vancouver (date tbd).  Both these events were postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Project Update – November 2020
Turning Points launched on November 14, 2020 as a segment on PBS Newshour.
Link to full PBS Newshour 30-minute broadcast with our segment at 24:00.
Link to our segment web page on Indigenous Canadian film makers.
Over the next several weeks (on the weekend broadcast), the stories will roll out as a series on PBS Newshour. This is an exciting development as PBS NewsHour has incredibly high viewership and the video will exist in multiple forms, including television (which has millions of nightly viewers), web and YouTube video.

As a Peter Wall Scholar, Professor Klein will be researching best practices for improving global reporting methodologies, and will be working on creating a collaborative environment for teaching global reporting across universities around the world.