New TV Soap Opera Empowers Mexican Women

Ponle Corazon!, a new televisions soap opera to empower women launched during a five-day partner workshop in Rancho Santa Lucia, Mexico.

More than 30 participants - all received personal invitations from the First Lady of Chiapas - actively engaged during the workshop during which the program’s framework - the values grid - was produced, main characters defined and a central storyline created to encompass all the issues the drama will address.

“You can picture the process of creation for the telenovela as an hourglass figure,” Media Impact Programs Director, Brenda Campos, told the participants as they celebrated the completion of the story. “You start with a divergence of themes and ideas that converge into a values grid and eventually into a storyline. It is through the characters conflicts and dialogues in the episodes that all the themes unroll into behaviors, rewards and consequences.”

The telenovela, provisionally named Ponle Corazon! (Put your heart into it!), started as an exciting idea and now the project has the support from the State’s ministries of Health, Education, Women, Rural and Agricultural Development, Infrastructure, Environment and Indigenous Peoples. The government is providing the initial funding and production capacity, Media Impact training and mentoring in the Entertainment-Education methodology, and Canal 40 (www.proyecto40.com.mx) a national television network in Mexico, will cover production costs, such as equipment and post-production.

PCI-Media Impact empowers communities worldwide to inspire enduring change through creative storytelling. 
For 25 years, we have worked with local partners to produce programs that address the most pressing social and environmental issues. Using our unique My Community methodology, we engage and empower audiences around the world to improve their own lives. Working with local partners, we change the world one story at a time. For more information, please visit: www.mediaimpact.org

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