In February I went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi to take a documentary film making workshop presented by Barefoot Workshops. We had 4 very talented instructors and one of them was Julie Winokur. Julie recently launched a website for her documentary FIRESTORM, a film focused on the Los Angles Fire Department indirectly forced to handle the immense amount of medical-related emergencies due to inadequate facilities in LA.

“Every minute in the United States, an ambulance gets turned away from an emergency room because hospitals are simply too full. In Los Angeles, where the wait time in some ERs is as long as 48 hours, the entire 911 system is being challenged in ways that are alarming.

FIRESTORM follows Los Angeles Fire Department Station 65, located in South Los Angeles, a neighborhood with a largely uninsured and undereducated population. The LAFD handles all emergency medical services for the city of Los Angeles, and currently 82% of the department’s work is medical, rather than fire-related. Eleven hospitals have closed in just five years in LA, and the challenge of delivering more than 500 patients per day to a shrinking number of hospitals is overwhelming to the LAFD. With resources strained, and 911 being used for everything from heart attacks to stomach aches, LAFD paramedics have become virtual ‘doctors in a box’.”

In a world where we are perpetually surrounded by negativity, bad news, and tragedy, along comes BRICK CITY, a powerful, 5-part documentary series created and directed by the award-winning filmmakers Mark Benjamin and Marc Levin that “captures the daily drama of a community striving to become a better, safer, stronger place to live. Against great odds, Newark’s citizens and its Mayor, Cory A. Booker, fight to raise the city out of nearly a half century of violence, poverty and corruption.”

BRICK CITY is currently playing on the Sundance Channel. I highly recommend watching the documentary. Think about what change you can bring to your local community.

Things become easier, not harder, when we decide to give back and make change.