By Banker White | Director
While we continue to make plans for the launch of the WeOwnTV Digital Hub, we are fast-tracking the release of the SURVIVORS film and the We Survive oral histories database to offer them entirely for free in the context of the new Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda. With the WHO declaring the current outbreak in the DRC and Uganda a global health emergency, immediate access to local perspectives is vital.
We are days away from launching a dedicated site that streams our Emmy and Peabody-nominated documentary SURVIVORS, which presents a heart-connected portrait of Sierra Leone during the 2014 outbreak, exposing the complexity of the epidemic and the socio-political turmoil in its wake. Alongside the film, we are releasing WeSurvive: Stories of the Ebola Outbreak, an interactive database of over 50 video testimonies ensuring West Africans contribute directly and significantly to the historical record.
Because this new strain lacks an approved vaccine, containment relies entirely on grassroots community trust and local leadership—the exact blueprints documented firsthand by the WeOwnTV filmmaking team, during the 2014 crisis. International media preoccupation with the European and American experience distanced the world from the region at the heart of the epidemic at a time when duilding understanding was critcal. Furthermore, a deep lack of local trust in government and foreign aid organizations meant compliance with health practices came slowly. Because it is incredibly difficult to build that understanding in the pressurized environment of an active disaster, our archive provides an underrepresented, authentic blueprint for how communities actually navigate medical trauma and foster collective solidarity from within.
We are removing all paywalls and gifting these stories to the world as public knowledge, putting nearly a hundred hours of deeply personal, frontline footage directly into the hands of public health workers, educators, and community advocates. Your support right now will fund the web infrastructure and secure video hosting needed to keep this vital archive completely free, accessible, and ready to help save lives where it is needed most. You can support our effort to launch this new site HERE.
You can also give directly to the GlobalGoving Ebola Crisis Relief Fund HERE to support the musch needed.
With Love,
WeOwnTV
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