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Television Race Initiative and Active Voice

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Posted on November 21, 2002

Catalysts for Change

Additional research supplied by Carole Ashkinaze and published on the Benton Foundation website in 2000.

Within independent circles, building an audience for a political or social issue film is often called outreach. For 15 years, Ellen Schneider of The American Documentary, Inc. has helped forge an outreach process she calls "community engagement." In spurious terms, a hard-bitten Hollywood publicist might label that process an interesting approach to finding niche markets. More accurately, Schneider's brand of "community engagement" is a sophisticated mode of using the emotional power of documentary film to generate a broad base of viewers by connecting communities, sparking dialogue, and fueling activism.

"We see content as a catalyst, a creative element that can be positioned strategically in the pursuit of positive social change," said Schneider, Executive Director of the Television Race Initiative (TRI), a branch of The American Documentary. She is also the Executive Director of Active Voice, the most recent component of this ambitious and far-reaching strategy designed to create capacity for using documentary within American culture.

The Birth of TRI

After working briefly for New Day Films and as a researcher or associate producer for filmmakers such as Marlon Riggs and Dave Davis, she wanted to devote her time to projects more people would see, surmising that mainstream media could be infused with progressive content and still be entertaining. A friend called, asking her to help with a PBS series that was just completing its first season. Schneider hesitated. She felt that going back to work in documentary film was emotionally tempting, but might prove to be a personal career mistake. After viewing the films "Dark Circle", by Chris Beaver and Judy Irving, and "Who Killed Vincent Chin?", by Chris Choy and Rene Tajima, she made her choice. Aside from one-year at the Independent Television Service, she has worked at The American Documentary ever since.

By 1998, with Schneider as the executive director, Point of View (POV) had already proved itself successful within the AIDS community. Using "Heart of the Matter", by Amber Holibaugh and Ginny Reticker, as the glue, unlikely coalitions were built between large, mainstream community-based organizations such as the American Red Cross and less traditional grassroots groups like women's health collectives. This kind of coalition building was to become a signature of POV and was christened "High Impact Television."

The late 1990s was a prolific period for filmmakers examining issues of race. There was Emiko Omori's "Rabbit in the Moon", a personal memoir of Japanese-American internment; Orlando Bagwell's acclaimed series, "Africans in America"; and Macky Alston's, "Family Name", about the history of his family as plantation slaveholders, all films produced during that time. The next big step for Schneider and the staff at POV was to ask: How could the stories and images of powerful films like these begin to transform the discourse on issues of race through the collaboration of people in community groups watching, talking and working with those films; how could documentary film help to address the problems of racism on local levels?

In the San Francisco Bay area, "Well Founded Fear" inspired a group of clergy to initiate meetings with INS officials to address the dingy and unkempt conditions in the holding areas and offices where interviews take place, and in North Carolina a wave of attorneys volunteered to work pro bono on asylum cases.

The Television Race Initiative was created in 1998 as an experiment, funded in large part by the Ford Foundation, to strategically link powerful films, like these and others, over time. Films slated for PBS broadcasts, including some films selected for POV, became part of a campaign in six major cities: Norfolk, Raleigh/Durham, Baltimore, Boston, the Twin Cities and San Francisco. Community leaders from civil rights groups, cultural organizations, and schools, were brought together in "brain trusts," along with representatives from risk-taking PBS affiliates and a racially diverse staff of TRI facilitators, to plan and organize innovative ways in which the films could be screened and utilized within each community, both prior to a station premiere, as well as long after the initial broadcast date had passed.

TRI sought to assess how grassroots groups could leverage the story-telling impact of documentary. Since the inception of TRI, literally scores of screenings and discussions, along with a multitude of community actions, have taken place in each target area with more than a dozen documentary films.

Catalysts for Community Action

Through the prism of race and difference, filmmakers working with TRI have explored questions of personal identity, family origin, prejudice, and the persecution of new immigrants. With "Rabbit in the Moon", painful memories of imprisonment, long buried, were raised, not only for the children of Japanese Americans who remembered the extreme discrimination their parents faced, but for members of many other racial and ethnic groups. As part of its campaign in the late 1990s at KQED in San Francisco, TRI formed a multi-racial brain-trust, the station produced its own programming, including interstitial material on race to draw attention to the program, and various groups from churches to students initiated a multiplicity of uses for the film from sensitivity training about racism to collective actions on the part of the homeless.

Schneider is awed by the evocative power of film and constructing the mechanisms to channel that transformative power. She points to "Well Founded Fear", by Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini, which broadcast on POV in June of 2000. Filmed entirely in the offices of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), it documents the process of applying for political asylum. During the application proceedings, refugees must persuade an INS officer of a "well-founded fear of persecution on grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion" in his or her home country. In one case after another, the film depicts how a single interview determines who will be allowed to stay in the United States and who will be sent home.

In select cities across the country, TRI brought community leaders together, many who knew of each other, but had never worked together. Through focused discussion led by TRI staff, ideas began to fly. In the San Francisco Bay area, the film inspired a group of clergy to initiate meetings with INS officials to address the dingy and unkempt conditions in the holding areas and offices where interviews take place, and in North Carolina a wave of attorneys volunteered to work pro bono on asylum cases.

"Rabbit in the Moon" and "Well Founded Fear" are just two examples of documentaries among more than a dozen that have been utilized as catalysts for community action since TRI's inception. A significant outcome of TRI is that the process has changed the way local public television stations operate within their communities. And according to Schneider, TRI has learned a lot about how films create partnerships and sustain engagement among community groups.

Global Community Engagement

Active Voice, which received start-up support from the MacArthur Foundation, is a natural evolution of the "community engagement" model. Both TRI and Active Voice are motivated by a deep conviction that film can be a tool to move and connect people. Campaigns are designed to help people, once they have viewed the film, to get involved in the issues the films raise through organizations and individual action. But where TRI focuses on the theme of race, Active Voice expands the TRI model to issues of globalization, community health, human rights, and immigration. There are other distinctions as well. While TRI employs "dialogue-to-action strategies" among community-based organizations, Active Voice might apply the same strategies within workplaces, boardrooms, or correctional institutions. Active Voice is also open to programs that aren't slated for PBS broadcast, such as cable, theatrical, Web-based and grassroots distribution channels. Another important difference is that while Active Voice is supported by some grants, it also charges fees for its services.

"Muslims", a Frontline program that aired in May 2002, and "Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet", a PBS program slotted for December 2002, comprise "The Islam Project", another multi-city, year-long community engagement campaign developed by Active Voice. In the shadow of 9/11, educators and community leaders overwhelmingly joined brain trusts offering ideas and initiatives, from sensitivity training for FBI and other law enforcement agents, to interfaith potlucks. While bringing Jews and Muslims together in the Middle East appears to be continually short-circuited, dialogue and other positive outcomes from groups, on a smaller scale, using "The Islam Project" seems attainable. The question then arises: how to know whether The Islamic Society and Temple Israel in Boston; or African-American Muslims, the American Jewish Committee, and the Muslim American Political Action Committee in Atlanta will keep talking? Active Voice plans to measure the growth and sustainability of new organizational relationships, even suggesting other films that would deepen those connections, or strategies that might move new alliances into new directions. For "The Islam Project", evaluators track who gets involved, whether or not they receive press attention for their events, and if collaborations trigger new alliances.

Publishing community action kits, constructing Web sites, opening the conduits for viewer feedback, training facilitators and activists to frame discussion around a film and getting press coverage are all essential aspects of a successful campaign. The innovative and significant contribution of TRI and Active Voice is the avalanche of coalitions formed and networks of people being made. "We want to create a hunger for documentary film and get audiences to keep coming back for more," said Schneider. Capacity is created through a snowball effect that not only maximizes a film's visibility and builds its audience, but assures the longevity of a documentary project.

Read more about Televison Race Initiative and Active Voice outreach campaigns: 5 Girls