Ball Square's Global Reach

William C. Shelton (The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.) A modest two-room office in Ball Square is home to a media company with a global reach. Working in 20 countries around the world, Spectrum Media has designed successful campaigns to promote democracy in Mali, nonviolent conflict resolution in Jordan, environmental conservation in Madagascar, family planning in Tunisia, and sustainable agriculture in Senegal and Malawi. The Tunisian government hired Spectrum to encourage water conservation. Its territories bordering the Sahara are sparsely dotted with troughs, fed by wells. Often the nomadic peoples who used them carelessly left the spigot open when they moved on, wasting precious water. Spectrum designed inexpensive and durable ceramic tiles, embedded in the troughs, with quotes from the Quran admonishing Muslims to conserve water. The impact was dramatic. Investors in the Jakarta stock exchange were putting only 15 percent of their funds into local companies that would build the Indonesian economy. Five years after Spectrum's media campaign, the proportion was 85 percent. Spectrum's principal, Jamil Simon, lives on Willow Street, a half block from his office. His parents were Iraqi Jews who fled Baghdad in the 1930s, first to Lebanon and then to Egypt. When Rommel's Afrika Corps was bearing down on Cairo in 1941, they took seaplanes, flying from lake, to river, to lake, to Capetown, South Africa. From there they sailed across the South Atlantic, which was free of the Nazi wolf pack, to Recife, Brazil, took a boat to Miami and a train to New York City, where Jamil was born and his father opened a branch of his bank. Jamil fell in love with film in college and began making documentaries upon graduation. In 1969, after working in Baltimore with only three days off over eleven months of filming, he came to Cambridge to visit his girl friend. A hitchhiker asked him if he was interested in a Boston-area job, and at the age of 24, he became director of Apt Associates' film department in Cambridge. He's been here ever since. Whenever possible, Spectrum works with indigenous people to develop their capacity to continue media work. In Malawi, Spectrum set up a media center that produces radio and TV programs to promote sustainable agriculture. The Malawi project offers insight into how multimedia campaigns can be effective. The company produced a package to train poor farmers in new income-generating practices such as beekeeping and fish farming Each medium has its particular strengths. Print is best for conveying factual information, but many farmers are illiterate. Video is better suited for communicating motivational themes. Radio can reach a broad audience inexpensively, but many farmers do not have radios. Face-to-face communication delivers information most effectively, but is costly. Spectrum produced booklets that, through pictures, taught farmers how to undertake beekeeping and aquaculture. Trainers' manuals explained more technical details and the reasons for conducting specific practices. Videos demonstrated them and included successful beekeepers talking about how beekeeping had improved their impoverished circumstances. Flyers, calendars, and posters promoted training and reminded farmers of important practices. The newly created media center produced 150 radio programs containing motivational and educational information. Jamil says that taking on a new assignment is like being parachuted into a completely unfamiliar world, with its own rules, culture, language, and issues. You have to decode it all to get information out to the people who need and can use it. You can't arrive with solutions. You have to constantly listen. Too often, development organizations do not provide the information needed for indigenous people to become self-sufficient. In so doing, they encourage dependency. Spectrum's current project tackles a complex and fascinating challenge. Warlords in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, the Congo, and the Ivory Coast enslave the locals to mine diamonds, which they use to finance mass murder, rape, and child armies. Legitimate diamond traders throughout the world have joined in a compact called the Kimberly Process. They hope to ensure a secure chain of custody from diamond miners to markets so they may exclude "blood diamonds." In the Central African Republic, miners excavate legitimate diamonds from riverbeds. They think of themselves as agriculturalists, but have had to give up farming in order to make a living. In turn, the mining process destroys the land's capacity to sustain agriculture. Miners hold their individual plots by traditional rights, agreed upon by their communities. The state has it own statutory ownership definitions. Claim jumpers take advantage of this difference by registering plots as their own. A Vermont-based organization is working with mining communities to map out and attach GPS coordinates to individual plots and register them with the government. The more miners that become legitimate, the more their diamonds can be traded internationally, increasing the government's tax revenue. Spectrum is developing a campaign to encourage diamond miners to register and government officials to make this easier, teach miners diamond evaluation so that predatory traders do not take advantage of them, and ultimately train them in environmental restoration and more lucrative agricultural practices. Once developed, the campaign can serve as a template in other diamond-producing countries. Spectrum is but one of many Somerville-based concerns that are quietly producing innovations with global impacts.