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01 Sep

Posted at 17:18h in Uncategorized by
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NANCY LLOYD Strategy provides a foundation for translating our vision to reality. At its core, strategy extends across all of our tent poles, encompassing our stories, our impact and of course our tactical engagement plans. While we leverage our team’s resources and past experiences, we don’t look to template our strategic plans. We always start from scratch. It’s our integrated approach that taps the complementary skill sets of our team, and couples those with the resources and focus that the Fund and our partners bring to bear. I came to the Fund quite coincidentally. Earlier this year, I attended a screening of The Burden at the Sonoma Film Festival. Having several veterans in my family, I felt not only moved by the documentary’s focus on the positive efforts of our nation’s military to minimize its environmental impacts; I realized that I could actually play a hands-on role in sustaining these messages. I engaged Steve Michelson, the Fund’s Executive Director, to find out more about the campaign that they were commencing and asked how my skills in computer and database management might be brought to bear to the cause. I am enjoying applying more of my time now toward giving back to these causes with my sales and collaboration skills across various teams and tools. As it turned out, they were looking for an individual to research and resource funders, to identify potential partnerships, grants, and other sources of appropriate financial support. A clear mission, yes. But not as simple to execute as it may seem. Based on the strategy we set for each documentary, we outline criteria for identifying the potential partners and funders that match our strategy – not loosely but as precisely as possible. We need to understand completely the best matches as far as the content of past grants, their scale, their process and last, our comfort as far as the overall fit. In the past, this has been a strategic but more or less, a “hit or miss” set of outbound phone calls. However, the Fund has a full seat on the Foundation Center platform. With this resource, I can now cross reference and research the grant programs that have produced successes for similar film projects, and I can be incredibly strategic in cross referencing the many criteria of what funders are looking for and matching that to our campaign based films. While this is an exhaustive and detailed analysis that underlies our efforts, I’m betting my background will provide me a leg up on this process, not to mention the beginning of a meaningful career change at this stage of my life. Bottom line, the Fund is making a difference. And doing so with new efficiencies and resources that position our projects and our partners for success over the long haul. I’m personally excited to have joined this team, and I look forward to the progress I’m confident we will all make....

01 Sep

Posted at 17:13h in Uncategorized by
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LEAH LAMB There is a saying that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. We live in interesting times, and we are sorely in need of making meaning of it all. And by that I mean, we need stories, but not just any story. We need responsible storytelling. We need stories that fuel and feed us with potential and possibility of great things to come, that inspire and activate the best within us, and remind us that we are capable of being heroes of the movie we are starring in. Perhaps, less well understood is the fact that we need all of the stories about people who are working on the solutions. Listening is key. Not blind listening. We’re living in a moment in time when stories that have been hidden from our view are being surfaced…and it requires a kind of listening that we may not be accustomed to…generous listening. We need to know how to listen through the noise and roar of fear; we need to listen to the stories of our neighbors, the people standing beside us at the crosswalk, to the people who look extremely different from us, and to our own hearts. And we require radical listening… to what our inner genius is telling us about what we are here to express and give to the collective. While it may not be obvious, one of the most exciting new vehicles available to us today is crowdsourcing. We believe this can be a powerful means of building a community that sustainably supports our work and vision for years to come. Crowdfunding has revolutionized our capacity to organize the flow of our resources to what we want to see manifest in the world. Despite all the huge success stories, running a crowdfunding campaign requires a lot of sweat, Excel spreadsheets, and behind the scene strategy. It’s an art and a science, and as we execute on our plans to build communities that increase awareness of our stories and motivate audiences to action, we see crowdfunding playing an increasingly powerful role....

30 Aug

Posted at 22:01h in Uncategorized by
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JENNIFER EKSTRUM The Impact Producer for a film plays a role not unlike that of an orchestra’s conductor. Instead of sheet music that the conductor must creatively arrange, we develop a strategy for maximizing the impact a film can have, and we’re expected to translate that strategy to a reasonable and more importantly, doable tactical plan. Having made an independent documentary, and earlier in my career managed communications for cause-focused non-profits, I’ve come to understand that you need to know first what specifically you want to change with your film, and then you need to be both realistic and strategic about moving forward with activities and partnerships that galvanize and activate new viewers. As the Impact Producer for Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives, I’m working with an information and activities-based plan that will remind audiences of the environmental impacts of war, that will empower them to think more critically about elected officials they vote for, and articulate the positive impacts awareness can produce. While our film is over eight years old, we have five next-gen “shorts” produced from unseen footage and still photography that are the centerpiece for re-energizing awareness of war and its impacts. The vision we have is one of multiple constituencies, including students, teachers, veterans and even voters that can see a new ethic around war is possible, that we can do things differently. Longer term, we all realize that ultimately our vision is a paradigm shift that could take years, but for the present, we’re asking ourselves what can be done realistically and tangibly with both the original documentary and now the new shorts to create conversations about alternatives. In the Sixties, students protested across the nation’s campuses. Families had a stake in the war; many lost sons and daughters and friends. By contrast, today, the disasters as well as the learnings of war are really in the background of our daily lives. In sum, our goal is bring the reality of war out in the open once more, and to produce new understandings that will lead to a more Sustainable Tomorrow. If we can do that, we will have succeeded in making an impact…and bringing the vision of Alice and Lincoln Day forward to this decade....

30 Aug

Posted at 20:33h in Uncategorized by
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MARGARET POINDEXTER Engagement is my mantra. Working closely with the Impact Producer, in this case Jennifer Ekstrum, my job is to create a slate of partnerships and activities that that get our job done. We survey the landscape to identify groups that already exist that are aligned with our vision, and then we work closely with them to design events and communications programs that support both our efforts and theirs. For Scarred Lands and Wounded Lives, we see educational institutions, veterans, student organizations such as the Peace Action group, and even the Physicians for Social Responsibility as key bricks for building the foundation for our campaign. We reach out to them directly to learn what kinds of programs are possible and the activities that will draw audiences ready to act. With their input, we collaborate to design a smorgasboard of events, and we look to measure the number of people that will see our films and shorts, the organizations that can host screenings, and the individuals we galvanize to spread the message in other forums. Whether we engage individuals or groups, our goal is always the same: To inspire them to action. If we can motivate the construction of peace parks, or encourage young voters to dig more deeply into candidates’ positions on the environment and war, we will have renewed a momentum with forward motion that can lead later to a paradigm shift with respect to our attitudes and the practice of war....