India’s Bollywood and Nigeria’s Nollywood film industries are leveraging the power of entertainment in an effort to prevent disease and improve the quality of life for the hundreds of millions of viewers of their TV shows and films. A two-year, $2.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Hollywood, Health & Society (HH&S) is supporting a groundbreaking partnership across the world’s leading entertainment industries to increase visibility of pressing social and health issues.
➻Read the press release
HH&S is a program of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. As research by the Lear Center and others has shown, entertainment has a profound impact on people’s knowledge, attitudes and behavior. That’s why, since 2001, the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other funders have enabled HH&S to connect Hollywood’s creative community, including the writers of Homeland, Mad Men, House, CSI, The Good Wife, Breaking Bad and scores of other shows, with experts on the full range of public health issues, for free.
Now HH&S is going global, teaming up with new centers in Lagos, Nigeria and Mumbai, India that will conduct sustained and systematic outreach to their entertainment industries in order to increase the accuracy, accessibility and frequency of health and other socially-relevant topics in television, film and new media.