Noon Rotary Club - Documentaries on Humanity's Challenges

Published: Sept. 1, 2016, 10 a.m.

The Iowa City Noon Rotary Club presents Linda Harrar, an Emmy-winning documentary producer for WBGH in Boston. Linda has completed 20 documentaries for NOVA, and has traveled to 35 countries and all 7 continents to accomplish her work.

Linda says her passion for her creative work comes from having the chance to meet and interview world-famous scientists and leaders who aspire and join together to help solve humanity's problems. Linda has reason to be proud of her work. She completed a 6-hour series - Rx for Child Survival - that won an Emmy Award, for which actor Brad Pitt provided the narration.

Linda's productions help to communicate the importance of public health issues and the life or death consequences for millions of humans if such issues are ignored or ill-understood. Linda's work illustrates that creativity, leadership, commitment, and partnerships are critical to advance global health causes. She recalled that Bill Gates emphasized that better storytelling is essential to reaching the hearts of donors while at the same time highlighting the actual needs of local communities and intended impacts of humanitarian endeavors on behalf of vulnerable populations. Linda narrated a funny story from her conversations with famed epidemiologist Bill Foege (and previous director of the US CDC) who was instrumental in the success of the smallpox eradication campaign in India. When working to connect with her audience, Linda has learned to feature, 'where the hope lies' since what we, as humans, are really after is satisfaction. She sees this core similarity with Rotary's ideals of pooling human and financial resources to make the expansive commitment to plan, coordinate, and partner with so many others in so many local communities and nations over decades to eradicate polio worldwide.

For more information about this program and the Iowa City Noon Rotary Club, please visit iowacitynoonrotary.org.