Wilson Ha's Pre-Project Blog

    Amidst COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other social movements, I realized there was so much that I didn’t understand. I challenged myself to continually engage in work that would help me become more knowledgeable, antiracist, empathetic, and compassionate. During the summer and fall of 2020, three friends and I completed an investigative journalism project focused on disparities of COVID-19 cases in low-income communities and communities of color. There had to be a deeper reason why these communities were overrepresented in COVID-19 cases in the United States population. Engaging with Public Health officials, data scientists, professors, healthcare workers, physicians, and COVID-19 survivors, we created a website featuring articles about what we learned, sharing it with our school. I gained an understanding of the longstanding issue of health inequity happening in my backyard of Cleveland and the country. Health care outcomes rely on much more than simply treating a symptom. There are economic, cultural, environmental, and structural factors that affect a patient before, during, and after treatment. I was shocked to find out that access to healthcare wasn’t as much an issue as the quality of healthcare for communities of color, LGBT+, low-income, and those with language barriers. Even having access to the highest-rated health services may not provide quality care for these individuals when distrust, racism, and implicit bias come into play.  

Link to Our Previous Project: "Beyond The Bubble" - A Series of Articles

I’ve learned and accomplished so much, but the work is nowhere near finished. I aim to continually challenge myself to engage in work that will help me understand the world around me outside my own life, perceptions, and biases. This is why Sweta Balaji and I are dedicating our senior project to creating a podcast that branches from the work we pursued in the summer. We wanted to create a podcast because we believe that it will be an engaging way to bring issues of racial inequality to our private school community "bubble". This is why we are calling the podcast "Beyond The Bubble: The Podcast". Through some initial research and consulting some of our past resources from the summer journalism project, we have decided to focus on disparities and inequalities related to the COVID-19 vaccine in Cleveland for the first installment of this podcast. This doesn't mean we are ignoring the other pressing issues that relate to inequality in Cleveland, Ohio, and beyond, such as redlining, food insecurity, and healthcare bias. However, we wanted to focus on a specific facet of inequality that is relevant to today's social climate, such as the COVID-19 vaccine. The vaccine has been made available to the general public, so listeners from Hawken should be able to relate to some concepts of the podcast. While the vaccine has been made widely available to the public, there are challenges that make it difficult for some community members to get the vaccine. While we could certainly talk about issues related to the vaccine from a global or national perspective, we wanted people in our own community to be able to relate to these issues. Therefore, we are taking a local perspective to this issue.

We have already started contacting and setting up interviews with members of the Cleveland community who have experienced the challenges of access to the COVID-19 vaccine. We also want to properly represent the voices of the different perspectives about the vaccine in our podcast: those who desire to get the vaccine who are unable to get it, those who have easy access to the vaccine who chose not to get, and those who have gotten the vaccine who are helping other members of the community get access to the vaccine. There are many perspectives and isses to expore in related to COVID-10 vaccin inequity in Cleveland. Sweta and I are not completely aware of all the obstacles of inequality that prevent members of Cleveland and surrounding areas from getting the vaccine, nor do we understand the perspectives of all sides of the story quite yet. However, we are very excited to learn, or unlearn, more about issues of inequity and the perspectives of others by engaging in this work.

We are currently working with a Evergreen Podcasts, a professional podcast company based in Lakewood, Ohio. They are helping us to create one episode of "Beyond The Bubble: The Podcast", that will be produced to podcast streaming platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Soundcloud. They are mentoring us in how to construct, produce, advertise, and publish a podcast. We will learning and applying the skills of contacting sources and conducting interviews through Evergreen's Zoom-like platform made specifically for podcast recording, organizing scripts and recording host sessions, and editing the podcast with the help of a professional sound engineer from Evergreen Podcasts while using their software equipment.

While creating this podcast will certainly be a long process with obstacles, I am ecstatic to create this podcast and bring issues that I am passionate about to my own community. I believe that in order to dismantle the flawed systems we live in, the first step is awareness, converasation, and leaning into discomfort. Change only comes through a shift in culture and education. I am incredibly excited to embark on this journey and to listen to the end product. As an end goal, I hope that this podcast will have a positive effect on the Hawken community that can create community dialogue that leads to change. And can we just address the fact that Sweta and I are going to have our own podcast published on the internet???? I'm freaking out. Just a little bit.

-Wilson Ha