The series and the press coverage it generated helped to move the topic of dying out of the shadows and focus it both for families and for the healthcare professions. A cover story in Time magazine and articles in consumer and professional publications with a combined circulation of 285 million explored different dimensions of the complex medical, ethical, financial, emotional, and spiritual issues that impact end-of-life care. The national outreach campaign engaged 73 national organizations as project partners, ranging from the AARP to the American Medical Association, and the American Library Association to the National Federation of Interfaith Caregivers. They mobilized their members to seize the opportunity of this broadcast for professional development and community education.
   Public television stations played a central role in driving the campaign in communities as they brought local institutions together with the local membership of the national partner organizations. The campaign gave rise to more than 250 community-based coalitions and reached millions of people.
   Galvanized by the series and supported with tools that presenting station Thirteen/WNET in New York produced --including a 26-page discussion guide and an extensive Web site on PBS.org-- the coalitions worked through hospitals and hospices, senior centers and government agencies, educational institutions as well as religious institutions, to encourage dialogue among families, to provide information, to improve training for healthcare professionals, and to identify local priorities for better care.
   Their impact was extraordinary. Dozens of stations worked with their community coalitions to organize town hall meetings, screenings and discussion groups. For example, KCET in Los Angeles sponsored more than 20 town hall meetings and a screening, New Hampshire Public Television coordinated a series of roundtable discussions, and WGCU in Fort Myers, Florida, organized a daylong conference. Stations invited local experts to staff phone banks in their studios during the series premiere, and they fielded thousands of calls from viewers seeking help and guidance. In Kansas City alone, KCPT received more than 900 calls, the largest response for an outreach campaign in the station's history. About 50 stations produced local programs that looked at the issues from a community perspective. One such station was Wisconsin Public Television, which produced three call-in programs with a phone-bank of professionals available to make referrals to community healthcare and support services.

   Many stations were at the center of local coalitions that set ambitious agendas to reach out to their communities in multiple ways. In Maine, a strong movement to improve care at the end of life had already gained traction, involving healthcare professionals in hospitals and hospices as well as community members from around the state. On Our Own Terms provided an opportunity to build on this foundation. Maine PBS partnered with the Maine Council of Churches and the Maine Consortium for Palliative Care and Hospice to plan discussion groups in 13 communities and tapped its joint licensee, Maine Public Radio, to promote the discussion groups and encourage participation. After the September 2000 premiere of On Our Own Terms, Maine PBS followed up with a one-hour call-in program called On Our Own Terms: End of Life Care in Maine that included video reports on the community dialogues as well as interviews with the participants. Throughout the program, studio guests, including Kandyce Powell of the Maine Hospice Council, Michael Murphy of the Coalition for Death and Dying, and Dr. Laurel Coleman, an internist and geriatric physician, answered viewer questions and provided information on the resources available in Maine to aid the dying, their families and caregivers.
   A key to the success of coalitions was the power of bringing community institutions together to contribute their expertise, their perspective, and their resources to the project. KETC in St. Louis, Missouri, and its partners in the Gateway End-of-Life Coalition focused their action goals on community education. Coalition member Erin Feldman of Unity Health Hospice says "there are so many questions that arise when a loved one is dying, and many people don't have a nurse or a social worker that they can just pick up the phone to call. We wanted to produce a simple and user-friendly resource that would help them find the assistance they need." The coalition published 20,000 resource guides and the St. Louis Public Library helped to distribute them through 70 libraries in the metro area.
   On Our Own Terms was the catalyst for a commitment to better end-of-life care that continues to unfold across the country, and many public television stations remain at the center of this effort. From Seattle, Washington, where KCTS now serves on the state end-of-life coalition, to Indianapolis, Indiana, where public television station WFYI has been invited to join the advisory committee for a new hospice, public television stations continue to collaborate with community leaders to provide education and information that can lead to positive change.