Project Description

Public Forum and Toxics Assistance (PFTA) is a community outreach and education project of the National Institute of Environmental Heath Science (NIEHS) Center in Environmental Toxicology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. The core of the project centers on practicing and performing Forum Theater to hold community environmental health interventions, based on the recent scientific research being performed at the university.

Forum Theater is a technique developed by Augusto Boal and described in his book, Theater of the Oppressed. In this exercise, participants develop a theme from an issue in their everyday lives and create a scene where the characters create a solution. The scene is then replayed, allowing other participants to adopt these roles so as to change the original solution to the issue. This process results in a dialogue about the issue, an examination of alternative solutions, and a “rehearsal” for real situations. PFTA hosts community environmental Forum Theater workshops about issues in toxicology. Co-director of the program, John Sullivan, facilitates these workshops with the goal for the community of crafting new and innovative local and regional environmental health care policies. Previous discussion topics have included: acute and long-term volatile organic compound (VOC) exposure risks, which can be received from sitting near the local high school’s fence line, which borders the Texas Petrochemical company; the health effects of lead and heavy metals; and issues related to the inordinately high incidence of congenital heart disease centered in neighborhoods and subdivisions built on “decommissioned” landfills. After each performance, there is a question-and-answer session, when scientists offer their expert commentary and help brainstorm solutions. Plays developed from PFTA’s Forum Theater workshops have been performed throughout the Gulf Coast region.

PFTA focuses their efforts on the needs of Texas’s Gulf Coast communities in or adjacent to the petrochemical complexes and ship channels of Corpus Christi, Port Aransas, Beaumont, Port Arthur, the 13-county basin surrounding the Houston ship channel, and the Galveston County complex in Texas City and La Marque.

Their first play, Restricted Area, was inspired by social-cultural issues happening in an environmentally challenged neighborhood on Houston’s North East side. PFTA collaborated with Texas Southern University playwriting instructor Thomas Meloncon, to write the script about issues of environmental health and justice. The play is a character-driven piece that chronicles the efforts of concerned citizens in the neighborhood to clean up decades of toxic waste left by a defunct steel-casting plant and a spent catalyst recycling operation. Working closely with PFTA personnel, Meloncon used toxicological details pertinent to the neighborhood’s prior industrial operations in the dialogue, including descriptions of exposure pathways, explanations of the relationship between dose and consequent health effects, and an explanation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Super Fund abatement process. Post-performance panels of Restricted Area gave details on the clinical effects of lead exposure and directions for accessing free pediatric blood lead-level assessment programs. Restricted Area played in four separate venues to 355 people, including community leaders and city council members.

PFTA has also organized workshops, presentations, and courses about Forum Theater, which are presented at a wide range of venues, from local churches to national conferences. “Forum Theater as a Translational Science Outreach Modality” is the general topic for the site-specific workshops. For example, a PFTA “teatro” group regularly travels to Brownsville, TX, to bring important health information to the community through improvisational theater exercises. In Brownsville, the information recently in demand has been about diabetes management and domestic violence. Another example is in the workshops created in collaboration with Mothers for Clean Air in Houston. Community members attend these workshops to learn about health effects of the ozone, exposures to air pollution, levels and toxic doses, exposure pathways, body burdens, and disease clusters. The panel presentations also encompass a variety of topics, and vary from venue to venue. One recent topic emerged as a response to a community’s request for more information on asthma pathogenesis. So the panel members presented information about the role of particulate matter (PM) in triggering asthma episodes and exacerbating heart disease, as well as the role of volatile organic compound (VOC) exposures in DNA damage. “Using Theater for Environmental Education,” is a continuing education university-accredited course taught at the University of Texas at Austin, and also at their annual Summer Teachers Training Institute.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities

Practicing Forum Theater has helped PFTA connect with local communities and scientific organizations. One of the skills that this technique demands is collaboration among participants, which has helped PFTA build closer relationships with a community, as well as strengthen bonds among its residents. The collaboration between local scientific organizations has also been mutually beneficial, as the two organizations share their latest scientific research for the good of the community. For example, when PFTA collaborated with the Houston/Galveston Citizens Air Monitoring Project, the two organizations shared equipment and their employees. This gave local citizens the opportunity to attend specialized training sessions about air sampling, where they were both taught how to do “grab sampling procedures” and given the air sampling equipment. Citizen samplers now frequently check the cleanliness of their community’s air and add the information to the EPA-maintained website, which contains current postings of those sampling results. Another successful collaboration happened when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) invited PFTA to visit a general project meeting. Sharing their current research in asthma pathogenesis and epidemiology, the two were able to further the information known about how toxic exposures are linked to DNA damage. As a result, Jane Dale Owen, a noted Houston environmentalist and philanthropist, donated funds to finance PFTA’s ongoing research of this topic. This donation financed 20 citizen water-sampling buckets, distributed throughout the region to citizen samplers who will now periodically check the safety of their community’s water source.

A Forum Theater performance about environmental issues is also a clear way to express the university’s latest research to community leaders. After a workshop at the B.K. Bruce Elementary School, administrators better understood the reasons why students have asthma attacks. To cut back on potential asthma triggers in the building, the school enrolled in the NIEHS Center’s Management of Indoor Air Quality in Schools program (MANIAQS) to conduct basic particulate matter (PM), air quality (AQ), and mold sampling, as well as to propose solutions to help keep students healthier. The school also enrolled in the center’s Asthma Surveillance Project, which will track epidemiological data and correlate increases in morbidity with ozone exceedance periods in Houston. The research PFTA has since done on asthma also identifies children in low-income communities to be more susceptible to exposures of lead. Collaborating in a workshop with De Madres à Madres, they were able to assess the presence of lead and asthma triggers in participating community members’ homes, and propose solutions.