One of the biggest challenges for public awareness campaigns is reaching the target audience with the intended message. A good way to do this, coastal resource managers in American Samoa have found, is to put the message in the context of a community's cultural understanding.
"Our culture is very important to us," says Tali Tuinei, assistant public awareness coordinator with the American Samoa Coastal Management Program. "In Samoan society, there is no separation of society and religion. Our motto is, 'Put God First.' "
Because religion plays such a major role in the lives of the American Samoan people, Tuinei says, the coastal program staff created a Religious Consciousness Project to help spread the word about the islands' environmental problems.
"We saw this as a vehicle to expand our existing outreach program," she says. "Our hardest audience is adults. It's easy to go into schools and get kids to accept our message, but it's harder to get that message to adults."
In 1999, they created a taskforce made up of 12 representatives from the various religious denominations on the islands. Tuinei explains that they also contracted with a reverend at a correctional facility to serve as a liaison between the government agency and the churches.
At the taskforce's suggestion, the coastal program held a series of workshops with the Sunday school teachers, ministers, and other representatives of the territory's various denominations.
"We presented to them the environmental issues we have facing us now and what needs to be done to save the natural resources. We divided each workshop into groups and asked them to provide an action plan by the end of the workshop and give us suggestions on the best way to implement the plan," Tuinei says.
Ideas that came out of the workshops included encouraging ministers to put the environmental message into their sermons; putting the message into the local televised religious service, which rotates weekly between the different denominations; and incorporating the message into summer and Christmas programs.
The idea that has had the most impact, says Tuinei, is having the churches invite the coastal program to a special meeting where managers present information on issues such as water quality, population growth, wetlands preservation, and nonpoint source pollution.
Having the church's reverend moderate the meeting usually encourages the congregation to be more open to the environmental message. "You might be quick to insult someone you don't know, but you would never insult your own pastor," she says. "Most of the people ... listen and ask questions and by the end want to know more about how they can help."
Other benefits of the project include new contact lists that have expanded the coastal program's outreach into the villages. Tuinei explains, "For years we've tried to get the village mayors to help us, and that was unsuccessful. As a result of this project, we've had a village mayor workshop that has helped us start a water quality project."
They hope to build on these contacts, she says, "so that we can reach the individual chiefs in the villages, and then into the village councils."
Tuinei notes that the project hasn't always been easy, pointing out that the staff person conducting the process left and it languished until the position could be filled, and that every time they tried to evaluate the taskforce's progress the group would assume its job was over.
"We had many problems along the way," she says. "The message we want to send out is that it was a good idea. The project was not perfect, but we learned from our mistakes."
For more information on the American Samoa Religious Consciousness Project, contact Tali Tuinei at (684) 633-5155 or TTUINEI@doc.asg.as.
