The Connect Protect Recover campaign was developed by MEE Productions Inc. (MEE), under a contract with the Allegheny County Department of Human Services/Office of Behavioral Health to develop and launch a public-facing campaign to promote more equitable access to SUD recovery and treatment services in the County.

A goal of the campaign is to increase awareness of a range of County-funded SUD recovery and treatment providers, including those who are BIPOC-led and focused on serving marginalized and vulnerable populations. Read below to learn more about how MEE’s 30-plus years of experience working in underserved communities and its commitment to a community-centered approach was leveraged in the development and rollout of Connect Protect Recover.

About MEE Productions

MEE is a full-service, behavioral health communications firm which celebrated its 33rd anniversary in 2023. Over those three-plus decades, we have built a proven track record of engaging low-income communities across the country, including in Allegheny County. MEE specializes in engaging the hardest-to-reach audiences from oral-based cultures. They are also often those who are facing the highest health, social and educational disparities and the most underserved residents in a community. We educate and empower them so that they can be active players in developing solutions to the issues that are negatively impacting their families and futures.

Our success is closely tied to MEE’s by-and-for, community-participatory approach. We use community-centered approaches because we know that they work; our track record reflects our ongoing success in “moving the numbers.”

Much of MEE’s work involves leveraging community engagement to shift attitudes and change complex behaviors, engaging audiences in a way that leverages their inherent knowledge and strengths. Bringing a trauma-informed lens to every project has allowed us to gain deep insights into the daily lives and challenges of the kinds of residents who the County must effectively service in order to reduce disparities and adequately respond to the current needs and trends related to substance use disorders (SUD).

We deliver our messages by melding the latest, most culturally relevant digital technology with the power of what MEE calls “human-ology”—interpersonal (virtual or face-to face) interactions with members of a community. Together, our online and offline engagements increase awareness and create positive word-of-mouth at the community level.

MEE’s Experience in Substance Misuse Communications

In developing Connect Protect Recover, MEE is leveraging its extensive content-matter knowledge about substance misuse and its disproportionate impact on marginalized and vulnerable communities. Work in this area reaches back to early on in the “War on Drugs,” through the elevation of opioid use to the level of a public health emergency, to today’s explosion of overdose deaths due to the presence of fentanyl across a range of street drugs. (See Figure 1)

 

It was in 1992 that MEE’s first national research project for The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The MEE Report: Reaching the Hip Hop Generation, documented the many ills and challenges that were engulfing low-income Black youth in the hardest-hit communities, including crack cocaine, marijuana and other illegal drugs. For years, MEE has documented how racial disparities in prison sentencing for cocaine versus crack possession and use resulted in poor Black and Brown people being demonized and jailed, devastating entire swaths of communities. (See Figure 2)

Figure 2:

MEE’s commitment to the community includes sharing — through capacity-building trainings and technical assistance — what it knows that works to overcome these and other disparities, in a way that will benefit the treatment/recovery provider community’s impact at the grassroots level.

MEE Case Studies Materials/Publications

These publications gather and share insights from MEE’s three-decades of communications, social marketing and community-engagement work. They showcase a variety of case studies from projects across the country. Click the image to view or download each issue.

UrbanTrends
Vol 26

UrbanTrends
Vol 25 No. 2

UrbanTrends
Vol 25 No. 1