All Our Hearts
My name is Lena Camilletti, and I’m an engagement journalist serving the opioid-use disorder community.
It’s important that I’m upfront with you about my motivation to serve this community, because of just that — I have motivation and determination to make an impact — to improve the lives affected by this disease.
When I was 11, my parents told that my sister Angela was coming home from college to be on house arrest for drug-related charges, and I was thrilled. To me, this just meant that I was going to have more time with my big sister, and she wouldn’t even be able to leave. It wouldn’t be until after her death that I would grasp what it meant to have opioid-use disorder, drug-related charges, and understand the privilege that it is to be sentenced to home confinement, rather than jail.
Terms like addict and heroin addict were often used to describe what Angela was experiencing, but her opioid-use disorder was always treated as a disease in our home, rather than a choice. Without even knowing it, my parents and Angela were engaging with self-stigma. The language they were using reduced Angela’s disease to shame, because that’s the tone society had set — empathy was sparse.
We can exercise empathy and want to make a positive impact within a community while integrating traditional journalism ethics and practices. Some of you may think I’m describing advocacy — but, the project I helped to develop actually bridges an information gap — one that exists, in part, because the failures of traditional journalism.
Just over a year ago, Maddie Linsenmier died as a result of opioid-use disorder. Her sister, Kate O’Neill wrote an incredibly humanizing obituary, which was published in Seven Days, a publication based in Burlington, Vermont. The obituary went viral. Individuals from all over the world were commenting on the obituary, sharing their own stories of people they love and lost as a result of opioid-use disorder.
In January of this year, Seven Days hired Kate O’Neill to write a year-long series called Hooked: Stories and Solutions for Vermont’s Opioid Crisis. And Seven Days deputy publisher Cathy Resmer proposed a related project: an online memorial for the opioid-use disorder community — our community.
That’s when Cathy hired myself and Claire Skogsberg to help develop what is now All Our Hearts.
The stories published on All Our Hearts are told in the words of people who loved someone who died as a result of this disease. The intention of the project is to awaken empathy for lives affected and also offer an opportunity for family members and friends to heal.
Claire and I were responsible for helping to develop a form that now serves as an initial interview for people who want to share their loved one’s story with All Our Hearts. We met with community members who work with individuals and families affected by opioid-use disorder, and produced a set of prompts that aim to help us learn who a person was at their core, and the life they lived before and through their opioid-use disorder.
We included three stories with the launch of the form in August. The allourhearts.com website was up and running shortly after September.
All Our Hearts has been featured in Buzzfeed, Boston.com, and the paper in West Virginia that gave me my first job in journalism, The Observer. We’ve logged more than 120,000 page views since September, and gathered more than 60 stories from all over the country.
So for my practicum, I lead the community engagement aspect of the project.
About 15 years ago, a young Vermonter, Sam Cohn, tragically died — unrelated to opioid-use disorder. Each year since, his family and friends gather on his birthday to make Sam Stones. Each stone is hand crafted and has Sam’s name on one side, and a web address on the other. They then take the stones with them to new cities, towns and even countries they visit, and they leave the stone in a random spot where someone else can see and find it. And when a stranger goes to the web address, they find Sam’s legacy.
Sam’s dad, John Cohn, helped us to develop our own version of this for All Our Hearts.
I planned two events to make this happen. At the first event on November 9, we invited a few families who submitted stories to help us make the stones. There were about eight of us that sat around a table and hand crafted each stone into a heart. We stamped one side of the stone with our website, then asked our attendees to personalize the other side. As one of the attendees, Margery said, it was palpable — family members who had mind bending losses sat together and worked clay, and wrote the names of their loved ones to remember these remarkable people who have died.
All together, we made 200 stones in about three hours. My parents joined us to honor my sister, as well.
The second event took place two days ago in Burlington as well. We invited the community to learn more about our project. Visualization to show from which states our stories were gathered, and an interactive aspect as well — attendees were invited to write a message to show how All Our Hearts impacted them. Additionally, family members shared how this project impacted them.
But, the main purpose of our event was to distribute the stones we made, in hopes of people in different towns, cities and countries to find our loved one’s stories — to awaken empathy. I hope you’ll consider taking one following the presentations.
In the audience at the second event were city councilors, the mayor of Burlington and state legislators — people who can make the decisions that have a direct impact on the community. All Our Hearts is inspiring action.
This matters because it is a public health crisis. It matters because it claimed my sister’s life. And it matters because opioid-use disorder can happen to anyone — and if we don’t actively work to better understand this community — our community — our friends and family will continue to struggle. Our perception of opioid-use disorder, as a society, has a direct impact on treatment approaches, access to treatment, patient care, and recovery resources. And, it impacts an individual’s ability to feel worthy of treatment and recovery at all.
The most important part about having the opportunity to pursue a degree in social journalism is that I have made an impact — through listening, observing, and holding myself accountable in a community that I’m part of. This program has taught me the value of giving myself permission to be an empathetic storyteller, while remaining an honest, ethical journalist.
In addition to learning engagement practices, I had several other opportunities through school that have prepared me for this profession. Last fall, we worked as verifiers for Electionland at ProPublica. In the spring, I worked at NBC National News sharpening those verification skills. Now, I’ve accepted a position at ABC News as a Social Newsgathering Producer.
At the end of the day, social journalism isn’t about meeting a deadline — it’s the practice of recommitting to the humanity we wanted to serve in the first place — our community — and listening to be the voice of others.
