Entertainment - Public Health Summit

The Population Media Center (PMC) is an organization that helps to improve the health and well being of people around the world through the use of entertainment and education strategies, while promoting healthy lifestyles. Headquartered in Shelburne, VT, the organization recently collaborated with various public health institutions such as the Rollins School of Public Health, CDC, and Harvard University to host the Entertainment Public Health Summit in Atlanta, Georgia promoting public health within the media. The summit explored how mass media entertainment is essential to behavior change on a mass scale, communicating to children about improving social and health outcomes by empowering them to participating in creating entertainment health models, focusing on special markets that accounts for cultural qualities in minority audiences, and delved into new challenges of health communication.

The main goal of the Population Media Center is to collaborate with the media on a global scale in an effort to educate people about encouraging effective family planning methods, women's health status towards the promotion of gender equality, and educating the public about the benefits of small families. This organization is a perfect example of how to incorporate the media, messages, and positioning itself to reach the public in an efficient and effective way. By successfully combining their efforts with well known public health institutions, it provides a level of validity regarding their health promotion strategies and messages. Hopefully, their messages can also provide an easier sense of health literacy since the agency works directly with producers and writers to create entertainment programs that help incorporate health issues based on formative research findings resulting in country specific and culturally sensitive formats.