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Outreach Journal: Made in L.A.

Published on November 17, 2008

By Kathryn Robertson

Lupe Hernandez moved from Mexico City to L.A. at a young age and worked for meager wages in garment factories for 15 years. Maura Colorado toiled in the factories for 17, leaving her kids with relatives back home in El Salvador. Meanwhile, Maria Pineda moved to L.A. with her husband and began working in the factories at the age of 18, and after 23 years the sub-minimum wage pay became too much for her.

All of these women came to the U.S. hoping for better opportunities but those hopes were quickly dashed. Hernandez, Colorado and Pineda regained control of their lives by joining forces with other workers at the Garment Worker Center to boycott and sue their employer, a nation-wide chain of trendy clothing stores.

Filmmakers Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo captured these women's triumphant three-year struggle to stand up to the colossal clothing chain in their Emmy-winning film Made in L.A.

"When I started this film, more than five years ago, my goal was only to create a short documentary that portrayed the conditions of Latina immigrants at Los Angeles factories," Carracedo wrote in her director's statement. "But, in the five years the film took to complete, it slowly, unexpectedly, became an intimate portrait of an increasingly universal experience in today's globalized society: the struggle of recent immigrants to get a foothold, to learn their rights and to assert their voice in our society." Carracedo and Bahar captured this by filming the project in an unobtrusive, informal and intimate way; visiting the factory regularly and getting to know the women whose stories they were documenting.

Bahar and Carracedo used a similarly informal and intimate method to raise money for the film. They threw house parties and distributed "screening kits," instead of going the traditional route of requesting grants, to gather the money they needed. The screening kits enable small activist organizations with proportionally small budgets to lend financial support to the film by allowing them to buy ten DVDs for $150, have a screening party and sell the DVDs to the audience afterward. The house parties that Bahar and Carracedo organized helped them to connect to the community as a whole and thereby gather both financial and emotional support as well as feedback.

Bahar and Carracedo would provide food and drinks and entertainment in the form of music or auctions, and then they often screened a trailer for the film and had someone who was recognized in the community do a money pitch for them. They estimate that even a small community event like this could bring in nearly $9,000.

The filmmakers began by looking for a set of people who might be willing donors -- people who care about the topic of the film, the arts, or the filmmakers' themselves. "It's important to note that a fundraiser only works when it is conducted with integrity and with respect for your potential donors," Carracedo and Bahar wrote in their guide to fundraising. "At its best, it is a symbiotic relationship: you need THEM (caps theirs) to help support your work, and they need YOU to create the kind of work that they want to see--and that you're hopefully already creating."

Then they went about setting goals. They came up with a realistic budget and timeline, as well as one that might have been less plausible but that motivated them to try to reach beyond the minimum. In addition to creating a timeline for completing all the fundraising, it was important to set a realistic timeline for planning each individual event because it sometimes took up to three or four months.

Once that was taken care of, Carracedo and Bahar went about finding a host for the party, usually someone well-known and liked in the community.

Then they found sponsors for the event, and established sponsorship levels such as sponsor, co-sponsor, or host, depending on the amount an individual or group donated. They also tried to include celebrity guests, which they called honorary hosts. And they were open to non-financial donations as well, like getting help mailing the invites.

As far as creating the invitations, they wanted to make sure that the names of the sponsors on the invitations attracted the community they were trying to reach and demonstrated the support the event already had. The invitations always mentioned that donations would be requested, but they often asked for smaller sums from students and couples and always admitted people even if they didn't give a donation. They tried to keep the invitations simple overall, to keep costs down and to keep the design readable and neat.

To find invitees, Carracedo and Bahar sent invites a month ahead of time to everyone they could think of and asked others to send invitations as well. They continued to send reminder emails in the weeks leading up to the event as well, and talked to local media outlets for publicity. "The effect of outreach will be measurable in terms of the monies that you raise and will also impact how much 'buzz' and 'word-of-mouth' you are able to generate as a result of the event," Carracedo and Bahar wrote.

Using this method they managed to get funding from several foundations including The Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Unitarian Universalist Fund for a Just Society plus nearly 300 individual donors. And eventually, the film became a huge hit. It won numerous awards in addition to its Emmy, was featured in PBS's POV series, and was included in several film festivals including the Havana International Film Festival.

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This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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