CT DELIVERS FOR ANTI-OPIATE MEDIA PROGRAM WITH ‘CHAMPS VS. STARS’ WIN

Charlestown native competed for BINJ and F.I.G.H.T.

As we reported last week, Charlestown native Chris ‘CT’ Tamburello competed on this most recent season of MTV’s “Champs Vs. Stars” for F.I.G.H.T., a BINJ program in which we are teaching people in recovery — as well as their friends and family members — about filmmaking and media. Here’s a little more about F.I.G.H.T., which you can read all about at fightopiates.org:

Along with his team from Mood Swing Moving Pictures, Oxy Morons director Johnny Hickey will provide opportunities for aspiring creative artists and journalists to participate in front and behind the camera.

In addition to serving as a mentorship program through which young people will learn about employment opportunities in the entertainment and media industries, the content produced by F.I.G.H.T. will push the envelope for how the opiate crisis is covered in Greater Boston. Unlike the impersonal outsider approach often taken by mainstream news outlets, the segments produced will reveal the ugly underbelly of affairs to build awareness around the collateral damage of opiate abuse.

So that F.I.G.H.T. material is disseminated as wide and as far as possible, in addition to distributing through their own film and web channels, for this project Hickey and Mood Swing are collaborating with the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ for short), which will distribute segments on television and radio, and also generate print and online versions told by participants in recovery.

Of course, this news is more exciting now that CT kicked much behind on the show, all the way through the finals, to secure $50,000 for these initiatives. As a result, we will be able to not only continue doing workshops (we will be announcing upcoming dates soon), but we now have resources to help people in recovery tell their stories through various kinds of media, and to distribute those stories. This was the plan all along, and we couldn’t be more excited.

Please stay tuned for more announcements about BINJ and F.I.G.H.T., and be sure to sign up for update emails on the site. For now, we would like to thank CT for coming through for this local cause. At one point in the final competition, when asked how he pulled ahead of his contenders, CT told the host, “The strongest muscle in the body is the heart.” We couldn’t agree more.