- [Pamela] Tonight, we visit a North Kingstown company with a mission to end child hunger.

- So far we've been able to reach 22 million children.

And I always believe we're just getting started.

- Well, good frigging morning from New England.

- [Michelle] And one Rhode Islander tells us what it's like to be TikTok famous.

- I think the biggest misconception is that it's not a career and that it's not a job.

- [Pamela] Then we meet a group of vigilantes, armed with paintbrushes, fighting graffiti at some of the state's most breathtaking locations.

- I know about painting and colors and nuance, so we said, "Let's try painting over it, camouflage."

(bright music) (bright music continues) - Good evening, welcome to "Rhode Island PBS Weekly", I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

It's estimated that malnutrition around the globe contributes to more than three million deaths of children under five years of age annually.

- Tonight, we introduce you to a woman from Barrington who is determined to change all that.

Several years ago, she founded a company that delivers a powerhouse pack of nutrients to starving children all over the world.

- I think it's our most basic need in life is food and nutrition.

So without that, we really aren't setting children up for their best chance that they would have in life.

(child crying) - [Pamela] Giving a child a chance in life serves as the compass for Navyn Salem, she's on a quest to end malnutrition for children around the globe under the age of five.

And she's doing it here in a plant at Quonset Point's Industrial Complex in North Kingstown.

Around the clock, they manufacture these simple squeeze packets of a fortified peanut butter called Plumpy'Nut.

The nutrient enriched paste doesn't need water or refrigeration and is easy for kids to feed themselves.

It has been proven to take a child from the brink of starvation to salvation in just six to eight weeks.

Salem named her company, Edesia.

Which means?

- Edesia is the Roman goddess of food, and so we thought that she really represented what we wanted to be and what we wanted to create here.

- [Pamela] She's created a social enterprise and what Salem has accomplished since founding Edesia in 2010 is astonishing.

- Running 24/7 allows us to deliver products through UNICEF, the World Food Program, and USAID to 64 different countries.

So far we've been able to reach 22 million children and I always believe we're just getting started.

- [Pamela] Salem got started when her four daughters, now grown, were all little girls.

The idea was born when her father brought her to visit his homeland in Tanzania, where generations of her family settled after leaving India.

She visited a clinic like this one in Chad, and her humanitarian mission took shape as she witnessed heartbreak.

- The first time that I saw a two year old that looked like my newborn at home, I realized that this is an incredibly urgent situation.

That is something that I could never unsee or forget about.

It stayed with me all the time.

- You tackled a world problem as a young mom with babies of your own, how did you find the energy, the willpower, and the time to do it?

- We're all busy and we can make excuses for why we can't do things.

I thought to myself, now's not the best time to start a business, but how can we wait?

How can this issue wait one more day or one more week without doing something to address it?

- [Pamela] Salem has traveled the world seeing the transformation Plumpy'Nut produces firsthand.

- They have to eat one packet in the clinic in order just to prove that they can eat it and they don't have complications.

After they've exited the severe program and they're in the moderate, these children don't look anything like the ones that you just saw in the severe acute malnutrition space.

They are already being interactive, they're laughing, they're playing with you.

- What's the magic in it?

It's fortified, it has nutrients and calories and- - It tastes good.

I mean, even if you're a very hungry child, the food needs to taste good 'cause children, no matter where they are, they can all be picky.

(child vocalizing) - [Pamela] UNICEF says 155 million children under age five are malnourished, and the World Health Organization estimates 45% of deaths in children of the same age are linked to malnutrition.

Salem says the crisis is being fueled by two things, climate change and armed conflict.

- Climate change is causing droughts, years-long droughts and floods that are catastrophic.

They're biblical, right?

Like we've never seen before.

So this is forcing huge amounts of people to migrate.

New conflicts are arising every single week, also forcing migration.

I have seen children take their last breaths.

- [Pamela] But Salem says, while addressing climate change will take time, addressing the politics of hunger at the United Nations Security Council this summer was swift and direct.

Her briefing, how to combat malnutrition.

- We control the conflicts, we right here in this room, just as we decide to wage war, we can decide to end war.

You're literally sitting around a round table with Russia and China and all the powers of the world and your job, their job, our job is, how do we create world peace?

Really trying to get across the humanity of it, that we're not looking at statistics, you know, we're talking about real lives that are affected.

- Yeah, overseeing the entire operations and it's a much more bigger role.

- [Pamela] Andrew Kamara, Vice President of Operations at Edesia was once one of those affected by rebellion.

His family had to flee Sierra Leone during its long civil war.

- My two sisters and I ended up in Guinea, West Africa as refugees, so we had to learn how to survive, how to stay resilient, how to fight to really make it another day.

I think that experience prepared me for the work that I'm doing today, I felt like during my many, many years of living in a refugee setting and seeing suffering, human suffering, hunger and starvation and malnutrition and all kinds of difficulties that folks were going through in that part of the world, it prepared me to stay focused.

Padron?

How you doing, man?

- [Pamela] And Kamara is not the only one working here who has lived that experience.

Edesia's staff of 100 includes workers from 25 countries.

- Many, many of my colleagues have been through the same path as me.

They've lived in refugee camps, they were once hopeless, not knowing where help was gonna come from.

And today, they're in a position of giving back to those same refugee camps.

They take that job very, very seriously, there's no giving up here.

Folks come in, they would start the shift fired up, they will end the shift fired up, no matter how tired they are because they see the result of their work and the impact it's making globally.

There's a life is saved for every time you produce a box.

(machines whirring) - [Pamela] Kamara views each package as a box of hope.

The Plumpy'Nut inside provides meals for two months, enough to rescue a severely malnourished child.

- These could be your children, these are our children, these are the world's children and we all have to be part of the fight to give them a life that is full.

- [Pamela] And Navyn Salem is also concerned about children here at home.

Edesia has developed a plain peanut butter packet.

- There's a need for protein and something that was easily distributed, and ended up distributing it through food banks and school lunch programs across the US.

There's a lot of people in the US who are doing that though, and there's not a lot of people who are supporting and just planning for Yemen and Afghanistan.

- [Pamela] And while her main focus is international, Salem is always seeking ways to expand programs for all children.

She says it's not about treating malnutrition, preventing is the priority.

Currently, Edesia is creating a new Plumpy'Nut for pregnant women.

Meantime, Salem continues navigating everyday challenges to make a world of difference.

- I have some words on my door that say, "Find a way."

Like, we don't have the luxury of saying, "Ugh, this isn't working so well today."

Because, yes, we're gonna get interrupted everywhere on a government level, a policy, a war zone that a truck's trying to get through, pirates in Somalia, you name it, we've had it, right?

But how do you get around that and how do you make sure?

Because every minute counts.

It's pretty powerful to be able to take something that you made and understand that it's traveled halfway around the world to a child whose actual life depends on the fact that you made that box.

- Up next, influencers, social media personalities.

If you scroll through TikTok or Instagram, you'll likely come across their videos.

For some, it's a full-time job with a full-time salary.

If you're curious, like we were, about how it all works, we recently met with Rhode Island content creator, Ian Brownhill.

His signature look in a hooded sweater and flip flops, drinking iced Dunkin' coffee portrays him as the stereotypical New England guy, and he's cashing in on it.

Full disclosure, Brownhill helped promote work here at Rhode Island PBS last year.

(phone beeping) - Wouldn't you know, first thing in the morning, I come out here, I open up my front door to see.

- [Michelle] Westerly native Ian Brownhill has amassed a huge following on social media by creating videos.

Many of them poke fun at what it means to be a guy from New England.

- Hey, Ma, we got this nor'easter on the way, just wanna make sure you got your milk, bread and eggs, call me back.

Oh God, I would not wanna have to shovel that driveway.

- So for people who are unfamiliar with your videos, describe for me, what is the typical New England guy?

- That's a tough one, that's broad.

I think New Englanders are very fast-paced, very impatient, very protective of themselves and their family members, but also incredibly caring and loving.

And I think we all just kind of wanna live like a good life and anything that interrupts that is very irritating to us.

- [Michelle] Irritated by things like snow the day before Halloween, this video from 2020 has almost 10 million views.

- I should be putting on my Betty White costume for Halloween tomorrow, but instead, I gotta go down to my mother's house and get my winter clothes out of a box in the basement because I wasn't prepared for this, nobody was.

Good frigging mornin' from New England, folks.

- [Michelle] We met up with Brownhill at his home in East Greenwich, where he gave us a behind the scenes look at what it takes to be, as he describes it, a content creator.

At 31, he already has 1.2 million followers on TikTok and more than 145,000 on Instagram.

- When I first started, I was like, how can I market myself so that brands wanna work with me?

And originally, it was mostly because I wanted to create a name for myself in the acting world.

- [Michelle] But his popularity on social media has become more than a way to get noticed as an actor.

He's found a way to make a living, creating videos full-time, working with companies like Dunkin', Papa Gino's, and Iggy's Doughboys and Chowder House.

- All right, we are answering the question, do we prefer white chowder, red chowder?

- White chowder.

- White chowder, we got another winner, folks.

These companies will reach out to me, we'll have a conversation.

They'll say, "Hey, we would like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 videos from you spread over the next couple months.

We would like to talk about maybe some new products that we have.

We'd like to talk about, you know, maybe some things that we're doing for our local community, would you mind commenting on that?"

- [Michelle] He was making videos for almost three years before he earned any money from them, and even now, he says 90% of his videos aren't sponsored.

- These videos I make because I love making videos, I love entertaining and I'm going for a laugh.

The fact that I've been able to fortunately get the following that I have and create the brand that I have is what attracts brands to wanna work with me.

98% of the people that I work with are all New England based.

- [Michelle] Brands that resonate with his New England persona, who, like Brownhill, runs on Dunkin'.

- Delish, I feel like I can fall asleep right here - And he's got the outfit to prove it.

The Dunkin' costume.

- Oh yes, my onesie.

- Did you reach out to Dunkin' and say, "I need that costume."

- Mm-mm, mm-mm.

- [Michelle] They reached out to you?

- Oh, oh no, I bought that.

- [Michelle] Oh, you bought that?

Stop it.

- Oh yeah.

Dunkin' put that online, I said, "I'm gonna have that."

- [Michelle] Before Dunkin' was sponsoring Brownhill, he was dressing and acting the part.

- They were sponsoring athletes and mega million followers type of creators, but not smaller folk.

So I was kind of like, if I make videos and Dunkin' sees it, at some point, maybe they'll reach out to me.

- [Michelle] All of those videos gave him time to fine tune his New England character and his accent, a mix of Rhode Island and Boston.

- What's up with their accent too?

It sounds like Connecticut, Rhode Island and, like, York, Maine mixed in one, it's like awful.

- I don't got an accent, you got an accent.

If you're from like Southie or Eastie and you're like a true, authentic like Boston person, it's really like the Rs are really what gets dropped.

Whereas in Rhode Island, it's kind of just words that are specifically missing letters and vowels, like, you know, Warwick, Rhode Island, there's two Ws.

But if you're from Rhode Island, you can say, "Oh, I'm from Warwick."

You don't pronounce the second W for some reason.

Or you know, my mom will always say like, "Well, not for nuttin'."

And I'm like, "Where's nut?

What's nuttin'?"

Not for nuttin', it's not for nothing.

- [Michelle] His mom isn't at all surprised by his success.

- And all my friends, your son is so good, your son's so funny, he's so handsome."

I'm like, "Hey, he's my son, so you don't have to give me the handsome stuff, stay away, old cougar."

(all laughing) - If there's one thing I hate more than traffic, it's New Yorkers, especially the Giants.

- [Michelle] While Brownhill's always looking for a laugh, he's also exploring how to use his social media fame to talk about another topic he cares deeply about, men's mental health.

- A lot of people don't know that I'm in therapy once a week, that I go and I talk about my emotions and my feelings and my struggles and things going on.

You know, my mom always created an open door policy for our family.

So my mom has always been someone to say, "You know, I know you're upset, don't walk away, sit here, let's talk."

- [Michelle] Brownhill's not sure what his future as a content creator looks like, but he says the type of digital marketing that he provides is here to stay.

- I think the biggest misconception is that it's not a career and that it's not a job, and that what I do isn't hard and that it isn't something that could be like sustainable.

- [Michelle] He says he's approaching the future one video at a time.

- I don't know that I necessarily have a plan, but for now, as long as people will have me on their screens of their phone, I would love to continue to entertain and be there for you.

- Finally tonight, spray painted words and pictures are usually clandestine and often illegal art is now getting erased by a Rhode Island group who has tagged itself the Anti-Graffiti Vigilantes, but the method they employ against the perpetrators is an art in itself.

(waves crashing) - I love those rocks, yes, they're my friends.

I've known them forever, so I take it very personally when people deface them and put terrible things on them.

- [Pamela] Artist Holley Flagg has good reason to be protective of the picturesque rocks that define the 400 miles of Rhode Island's rugged coastline.

It's the view right outside the window of her third floor studio, in the home her family has lived in for generations.

This was her childhood playground.

- Grew up there, picnicked there, ran all over the rocks, know them like the back of my hand.

Also, I'm an artist, so I really love the beauty of them, they're just unique rocks.

- [Pamela] Raw natural beauty is the bedrock of Flagg's work.

She's currently painting watercolors of Nebula from images captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

- This is Madam Butterfly.

- [Pamela] Flagg is also a graphic artist, creating designs for the Metropolitan Opera and the Museum of Natural History in New York.

But when so-called "street art", spray painted graffiti, began proliferating along the rocks in her Narragansett neighborhood, the artist saw red.

(waves crashing) - When you see somebody defacing them and writing their personal messages, which they think are going to be immortal all over the rocks, it's really upsetting to me and it's visceral.

- [Pamela] Flagg was so outraged, she took justice into her own hands, forming the citizens group, Anti-Graffiti Vigilantes.

- Just lightly brush over it like this.

- Armed with only a brush and cans of latex house paint, she started taking a swipe at what she views as crimes against nature.

But what might critics think of their attempts to obscure the colorful doodles of others?

You see this as restoration of nature, others might see it as destroying urban art.

They say graffiti is an art, what do you say?

- I say, go somewhere else and do your urban art.

And some people do really fabulous art, and I respect that and I admired it, just not in nature, let nature be nature.

Let's see what color you got, that's, ooh, it's good.

- [Pamela] Soon a small posse of like-minded volunteers took up the charge.

Their restoration of these geologic gems requires wiping out the words and pictures in such a way it tricks the eye.

Instead of just a coverup, the rocks magically appear as they once were.

- I judge how close I am with the color that I've put on, really the key to a good job is to just feather it in really lightly, let the texture of the rock come through.

- [Pamela] At first, in an effort to be truly natural, the Anti-Graffiti Vigilantes tried to clean off the spray paint with wire brushes, even chemicals, nothing worked because the rocks were too porous.

The beach was too steep for sandblasting equipment, so.

- I know about painting and colors and nuance, so we said, "Let's try, let's try painting over it, camouflage."

- How did you come up with this technique of camouflage?

- I didn't really think about it, I mean, it's just very basic.

How do I make this look like the rock there?

I keep adjusting my paint colors as I go along.

You keep doing it until you like the effect that you've gotten.

- 'Cause the rocks are different, some are granite, some are brown so you have to pick the colors?

- Yeah, and you do many colors over one little area of rock.

You don't just say, okay, this rock is gray, here's gray.

- Get a big dry brush and you just smash it into the rock.

I think it's more just feel than anything.

- [Pamela] Joan Pavlinsky is a social worker, artist, and ardent Anti-Graffiti Vigilante.

- It's just a way of kind of making my own mark by marking over other people's work.

If you think about what art really is, it's mark making, you know?

And hopefully we're creating an environment so that it's not going to be, you know, vandalized again.

- If we do a good job, then they can't tell where it was.

So that's what we're hoping, that as you walk around here, you don't even think about the graffiti, it's just not what you came here to see.

- [Pamela] Volunteer Marianne Chronley joined the Anti-Graffiti Vigilantes a decade ago.

(bee buzzing) Spring and autumn, the band of avengers attack rocks at places like this, along Black Point Trail at Scarborough North Beach, near the iconic remains of the 19th century mansion, Windswept, itself the victim of vandals.

Chronley says they gather tips from informants.

- We watch for it, you know, and we hear about it, people tell us about it.

When we hear that it's down here, we say, "All right, we gotta get a crew together and come on down."

- [Pamela] The Anti-Graffiti Vigilantes go to great lengths to disguise the work of vandals, sometimes hiking through outcroppings and sea spray just to reach their targets.

- We have a large canvas, you know, a large graffiti canvas, and you're like, oh, you know, this is gonna take forever.

It's just like there's no way we can do this.

Within like an hour or two, it's done.

And you sit back and I am often amaze myself.

- [Pamela] These before and after pictures are testimony to the results.

Some photos we can't share because of objectionable words and images.

- Last thing you wanna do when you had a hard day at work, you're out with your dog, you're out with your kid, you're walking along the path and you see a large pink profanity like written on a rock, you know?

It's like, it just sort of just creates this energy that just drains you, I think.

- [Pamela] The Anti-Graffiti Vigilantes say, "Those who come to stroll along the shore often voice appreciation and sometimes offer to help."

- A lot of people say, "Oh, I'm so glad you're doing that."

They sympathize and they totally agree with how we feel.

And then other people are totally blank, they have no clue what we're doing and they just think there's a bunch of weird people.

- [Pamela] Undaunted, the graffiti vigilantes keep chipping away, true rock stars of Rhode Island's shores.

- It's with great satisfaction, so as I step over some of the rocks, I can think, ah, we've been here and we did that one, and we've done that one many times, we'll probably have to do it again.

But it's nice to know that we were here and it looks better now.

- I want you to be able to look at these beautiful rocks and not read things.

No words, no images, just say, "Wow, these rocks are really beautiful, this ocean is beautiful, and we are so grateful to have it."

(waves crashing) - Aw, a beautiful ocean state.

- Oh, it absolutely is.

- And that's our broadcast this evening, thank you for joining us, I'm Pamela Watts.

- And I'm Michelle San Miguel.

We'll be back next week with another edition of "Rhode Island PBS Weekly".

Until then, please follow us on Facebook and X, and visit us online to see all of our stories and past episodes at ripbs.org/weekly, or listen to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform, goodnight.

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