Description

Active Voice is a team of strategic communication specialists who put powerful media to work for personal and institutional change in communities, workplaces, and campuses across America. Through our practical guides, hands-on workshops, stimulating events and key partnerships nationwide, Active Voice moves people from thought to action. By highlighting compelling personal stories and perspectives seldom found in mainstream media, we offer a much-needed outlet to people across America to speak out, listen up, and take the initiative for positive change.

The seeds of Active Voice (AV) were planted at P.O.V., PBS's ongoing series of independent "point-of-view" nonfiction films. In 1993 then P.O.V. Executive Producer Ellen Schneider developed a model for leveraging the powerful human dimension of these award-winning films. Over the next four years, with support from Ford Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, she joined forces with media strategists, diversity trainers and facilitators to refine a sustainable model for linking social issue documentaries with community and national organizations. This team launched the Television Race Initiative (TRI), which used programs about race, culture and identity as a framework for community problem solving around issues of domestic race relations. TRI evolved into Active Voice in 2001. A full-service organization, AV maintains close ties with P.O.V. and other PBS programs, while expanding into additional venues, such as broadband, cable, theatrical releases and DVD distribution.