Community Initiatives

Active Voice Lab

Community Initiatives is a nonprofit organization that serves as the fiscal sponsor of Active Voice Lab. Active Voice Lab is a network of strategists who work with documentary filmmakers, nonprofit organizations, and funders to create campaigns to help documentary films advance social justice goals. It has created several frameworks for practitioners in each of these fields to create mutually beneficial and non-extractive relationships in planning and implementing these campaigns. This grant provides flexible support of Active Voice Lab, supporting work including a new initiative, ImpactExplored, a series of anonymized conversations with filmmakers, funders, and nonprofit organization leaders, which will explore the current state of documentary film impact campaigns, and the ways in which they have been affected by new conversations about ethics and equity and the disruption of changing patterns of streaming platform distribution. The intended outcomes of this grant are an informative set of findings about the nuances, opportunities, and patterns in work that uses nonfiction storytelling as a catalyst for social change.

Active Voice Lab, a project of Community Initiatives, is a nonprofit network of strategists and researchers that produces research and tools that enable media makers, funders, and advocates to effectively use documentary films and nonfiction media as part of an ecosystem that can help advance social change. Through its Prenups for Partners project, Active Voice convenes workshops and conducts interviews to produce a set of web-based guidelines that helps maximize the success of collaborations between filmmakers, nonprofits, and funders. The outcome of this grant is a framework that identifies common issues and proposes solutions to help media makers, funders, and advocates work together more effectively.

The Democracy Center

The Democracy Center at Community Initiatives is a fiscally sponsored program that strengthens global citizen action through training, campaigns, journalism, and facilitation. This award establishes strategic linkages between disparate, but flourishing subnational movements of civil society to address natural solutions to climate change and facilitate more effective and coordinated actions that can complement national mitigation commitments made under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The project expands collaborations in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S. on climate change resilience and mitigation, develops a “strategy bank” to offer guidance on effective citizen action, and provides thought leadership through publications, assemblies, and key collaborations. The project fills a critical gap in current policies and actions to address climate change by inspiring and complementing national commitments through more strategic, connected subnational networks.

For fifteen years, Active Voice, a project of Community Initiatives, has been a leader in developing and implementing strategies to enable people and institutions involved in social and policy change initiatives to better use documentary films to advance their work. Recently, Active Voice has begun to develop a new framework for categorizing and evaluating different types of social issue documentary films. While documentaries vary widely, from films that are intended to engender empathy (for example, I Learn America, a film following a year in the lives of five immigrant teens), to films that examine the effects of a public policy (for example, the State of Arizona, a film that examines the implications of Arizona’s SB1040), the methods and metrics available for evaluating documentaries are not sufficiently nuanced. A MacArthur grant will help Active Voice continue its research and development of the new framework by testing its efficacy with a small set of filmmakers and with a sample of MacArthur funded documentaries. Ultimately, we expect to see the public release of a new framework that improves the practice of describing, measuring, and evaluating the role and impact of documentary films in culture change and policymaking processes.

Active Voice’s ONWARD campaign will partner with four to six faith-based networks over the next year and work closely with them to create customized plans to use documentary media and journalism pieces in screening and discussion settings in order to facilitate positive discussions about the dimensions of immigration. Active Voice will curate and distribute an online bundle of documentary film clips, multimedia news features, data points, discussion modules, and toolkits that would be made available to partner networks.