Wiland-Bell Productions, LLC created And Thou Shalt Honor for national PBS broadcast in 1999 because of their life-transforming experiences caring for their aging parents. Their first broadcast led to a series of interactive Town Hall Meetings in PBS cities across the country.
The goals of each Town Hall Meeting are to enlighten, empower, and encourage activism among caregivers and their families. They also seek to alert them to services, providers, benefits and policies available to them in their communities.
Caregiving consumers need to know how to navigate their healthcare universe. Our nation now has more parents to care for than children. Caregiving affects each one of us. Forty years after the signing of the Older Americans Act at the beginning of the Vietnam War, caregivers and their families are still looking for answers. Across our country, family caregivers and their communities are coming together to share solutions and change the way we care for our parents, spouses and friends.
In each live, two hour Town Hall Meeting, a moderator seeks answers and provokes solutions from a group of diverse experts and caregivers. The panelists are surrounded by an audience of 100-150 people, capable of adding their responses to the content. The event is then videotaped and distributed to all community partners who directly helped support and fund each local event, such as with PBS stations like WEDU. These events are supported by aftermarket outreach activities that will extend the life of the event.
Each PBS Town Hall Meeting contains a short "historical root:" the reason why they are holding one in that particular city. In Kansas City it was because Harry Truman had first called for a universal health care policy while president. In Denver because it is the Baby Boomer capitol of America. In Milwaukee because a senior rally in 1977 called for their state legislature to honor their elders with programs. Now in Tampa Bay because South Florida history, dating back to WWII, is peppered with millions of people from across the U.S. and around the globe who migrated to its sandy beaches -- making Florida the state with the highest proportion of elderly – (source: www.census.gov)
For all these reasons, Wiland-Bell Productions, LLC continues to look at the role the federal government will play in the lives of American families and their elders in the 21st century.
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