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Stories of Change supports the creation of compelling film and media projects inspired by the work of renowned social entrepreneurs; builds and sustains a network of independent storytellers and Skoll-Awarded Social Entrepreneurs; and enhances story skills and the exchange of knowledge between these communities. This collaboration is predicated on common values and the understanding that working together, independent storytellers and social entrepreneurs can reach audiences and find pathways to a better world.
For a snapshot of Stories of Change check out our dashboard.
Sundance Institute and Stories of Change believe creative independent storytelling projects can elevate the world’s most pressing problems above the cacophony of the current media landscape, accelerate the work of leading social entrepreneurs, and advance social change.
Since the launch of Stories of Change in 2008, the initiative has provided major funding and development support for independent storytelling projects produced in collaboration with Skoll-Awarded Social Entrepreneurs (SASEs).
The Stories of Change Content Fund supports narrative, interactive, transmedia, and non-fiction projects. The current slate of Stories of Change projects are in various stages of development, production and distribution.
A feature documentary about how the contemporary system of governments and capitalism is failing to solve problems like inequality, global warming and political instability, and one man's belief in a solution: Anarchism. From Spain to Kurdistan, "Independent Diplomat" Carne Ross pursues this belief.
Director: John Archer
Producer: Cara Glynn
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Independent Diplomat
A virtual reality (VR) project that takes viewers to the Amazonian forest home of the Yawanawa people and into the mind of Tata, a 100 year old shaman who offers a vision for planetary healing in the midst of our current climate crisis.
Director: Lynette Wallworth
Producer: Nicole Newnham
MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS, Tracey Kidder’s Pulitzer-prize winning bestseller, made a kind of reluctant global health rock star out of the quietly charismatic Dr. Paul Farmer. Treating drug-resistant TB in Haiti, he and his partners openly defied the global public health care system by insisting on curing a disease that conventional wisdom said was incurable under the circumstances. Since that time, they’ve gone on to work in thirteen additional countries, significantly advancing the idea of health care as a human right throughout the world. Kief Davidson and Cori Stern’s documentary will go deeper into the story of PIH and their partners, to portray a range of remarkable and very human characters working in the field of global health care and social justice.
In the world of international development, success equals “sustainability, ” which usually means “economically feasible for a given population.” But Dr. Farmer and PIH focus on outcome: what will truly heal a patient regardless of inconvenience or cost. If a patient has tuberculosis and a leaky roof that contributes to their poor health, the PIH prescription is world-class TB medicine, a community health care worker monitoring daily progress, and a new roof, period. PIH – and their partners - view health care as a human right, and believes that we each have a moral imperative to act on that belief, no matter the cost. This view has become highly controversial: life-saving medicine and expensive technologies are commonplace in the West, but virtually unavailable to the world’s poor. Public health care and social equity are inextricably linked; and this film will tell the story of the doctors, nurses and patients who battle disease under difficult circumstances and overcome enormous obstacles to consistently connect even the poorest patients to the care they need.
When the earthquake hit Haiti – devastating all the major hospitals – Partners In Health immediately stepped in and became the fastest-responding, most coordinated organization on the ground – staffed primarily by 120 Haitian doctors and 500 Haitian nurses, many of whom lost their families, homes, and entire communities. In the massive media attention that followed, PIH became know in the mainstream. Meryl Streep even mentioned them at the Oscars. Suddenly a relatively obscure charity was heralded in the mainstream press. Following the success of Kidder’s book, the PIH team may have shied away from a documentary camera crew focusing on their work. But an in-depth film could reach exponentially more people with this remarkable approach to pulic health that defies expectation. Since producer Cori Stern is also a social entrepreneur, working in Liberia and Rwanda she’s connected with PIH as a person dedicated to poverty alleviation. Partnering with Kief Davidson who brings a stunning visual and a compassionate eye to direction, they are the right team to capture this multi-faceted story of one of the world’s leading health care innovators.
Kief Davidson is an award-winning feature film and documentary director, whose latest film Kassim the Dream, about a former child soldier turned boxing champion, premiered at the 2008 Tribeca film festival and won over 10 international film festivals including: AFI Fest - Best Documentary and Audience Award, and the Silver Docs award at AFI/Silver Docs film festival. Additionally, Kassim was nominated by the IDA for Best Feature and was released theatrically by IFC Films. His prior film, The Devil's Miner, won over 15 awards at festivals including Tribeca, Hot Docs, and Chicago. He received the FIPRESCI Award, the DGA Award nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Documentary Directing and won the PBS Independent Lens Audience Award. The Devil's Miner sold to over 45 countries and screened theatrically in over 200 cinemas internationally.
Pedro Kos is a director and Emmy Award–winning editor. His prior work includes editing Jehane Noujaim's Academy Award–nominated The Square, Lucy Walker's The Crash Reel and her Academy Award–nominated Waste Land, and Jon Shenk's The Island President. Bending the Arcmarks his feature documentary directorial debut. Pedro is from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and received a BA in theatre directing from Yale University.
Cori Shepherd Stern divides her time between international NGO work and producing film. Her credits include The Arizona Project for Miramax, script by Sheldon Turner, Ben Affleck directing. The film is based on true events in 1970’s Arizona, which lead to 19 indictments of major crime figures and shut down mob activity in Goldwater’s Arizona. Cori is also executive producing Warm Bodies for Summit, written and directed by Jonathan Levine. Additionally, Cori is known for her work as a social entrepreneur and innovative strategist for poverty alleviation. Her projects have been featured on BBC, NPR, and Oprah. She was named by ABC World News as “Person of the Week” and O Magazine as “Good Guy of the Month.”
We are driven by three goals: to care for our patients, to alleviate the root causes of disease, and to share lessons learned with other countries and NGOs. We bring the benefits of modern medicine to those most in need and work to alleviate the crushing economic and social burdens of poverty that exacerbate disease.
PIH believes in 5 fundamental principles:
In 1974 , a young economist in Bangladesh loaned a total of $27.00 to 42 families. Today, millions of women in the developing world have improved their lives through micro-lending programs of Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank. Now, Grameen America is taking this simple yet radical concept to the streets of New York: 5 poor women- each with a dream- 5 low-interest loans, weekly meetings with group accountability, but no collateral, no guarantee. Can they build their American dream with a couple hundred dollars and a proven micro-credit model? Will Yunus’ model succeed in the financial capital of the world?
Director Gayle Ferraro made her first film about the Grameen bank in 2000, profiling an illiterate young woman in Bangladesh who borrowed enough to buy a chicken, then a rickshaw, and create a micro-business. Ten years later, she returned to film that same woman, now mother able to send her daughter to school. The success of To Catch A Dollar, is in how it interweaves the history of the founding of the first ever bank for the poor, with its introduction in the US following the financial crisis of 2008, showing how a world-changing innovation can be adapted to meet the changing needs of societies and communities.
Ferraro was already following Muhammad Yunus on his global mission to spread the word on microcredit when ‘Stories of Change’ issued the call for proposals. Since some consider Yunus the original social entrepreneur, it was only fitting that To Catch A Dollar was the first in the series to be complete. The film had its world premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and was released theatrically in the Fall of 2011.
Gayle Ferraro, founder of Aerial Productions, brings personal accounts of extraordinary and socially compelling stories to the film circuit. To Catch a Dollar is Ferraro’s fourth independently produced and directed feature documentary. Ferraro’s previous works include: Ganges: River to Heaven (2003) where with unparalleled intimacy the film explores dying in the holy city o f Varanasi, India; Anonymously Yours (2002) shot clandestinely in Burma follows the harrowing world of sex-trafficking through the stories of four young women; and Sixteen Decisions (2000) an intimate look at one young woman’s challenges in rural Bangladesh to change her family’s life of extreme poverty. She received a Masters Degrees in Public Administration from Harvard University and Mass Communication from Boston University and studied International Human Rights Law at Oxford University.
A VR project that takes place in the remote desert in Western Australia, home of indigenous elder Nyarri Morgan and the Martu tribe. Morgan recounts his profound first contact with Western culture, and the dramatic collision between his traditional world view and the cutting edge of modern technology.
Director: Lynette Wallworth
Producer: Nicole Newnham
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Landesa
A scripted episodic crime series about a college student who tries to find his missing sister he suspects has been the victim human trafficking.
Director: Kip Oebanda
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Vissayan Forum
Latin America’s top chefs are crafting a culinary movement, partnering with indigenous peoples to bring Amazonian food to urban haute cuisine. This documentary series follows the intertwined lives of chefs and the Amazonian communities focusing on how commerce in food can provide both a sustainable living for locals and thrill the palettes of urban foodies, while forging a new path preserving the Amazon biome and the future of its people.
Producer: Patricia Finneran and Greg Moyer
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Forest Trends
For one moment, an unlikely group of people join forces to stop a catastrophe. Three heroes – a Jordanian, a Palestinian, and an Israeli – together with 20 other swimmers from across the world, undertake the first ever swim across the Dead Sea to call on their governments to prevent the demise of this unique shared sea.
Director: Ido Glass and Yoav Kleinman
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: EcoPeace Middle East
Mohammed Rezwan is re-casting rising rivers as channels of communication—and transforming lives along the flood-prone river basins of Bangladesh. Rezwan, an innovative architect and social entrepreneur is building solar, powered floating schools. Replete with Internet connections, they’ve become mobile hubs for hundreds of communities facing the not-so-easy challenge of water taking their land and destroying their livelihoods. Can this soft-spoken inventor overcome both flooding and global indifference? With a concept that is elegant and home-grown, Rezwan is helping his country adapt to the new climate reality—and cultivating the next generation of problem solvers. While some still argue the reality of global warming as a man-made phenomenon, Bakers’ film shows the human face of climate disaster and highlights one simple, affordable adaptation that is changing lives by building a future that floats.
Washington, DC based filmmaker Glenn Baker spent 7 years in South East Asia as an adolescent and developed a life-long connection to the region. “I visited East Pakistan in 1971, at age 12, just two months before the bloody revolution that would rename it Bangladesh” His producing career focused on international affairs (Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria) and his first feature STAND UP: Muslims American Comics Come of Age is a cross-cultural comedy reflecting a post 9/11 nation’s perception of Islam. Baker returned to Bangladesh in 2008 in search of a personal, human story about climate change. Easy Like Water is the result of his commitment to this story: as of November 2011 the film is in post-production. Rezwan’s innovative strategies have expanded to libraries and health care facilities and have been featured on CNN and at the Cooper-Hewitt museums ‘Design with the Other 90%’ exhibit at the United Nations.
Glenn Baker is a filmmaker with more than 40 documentaries broadcast on PBS exploring global security issues. He produced and directed STAND UP: Muslim American Comics Come of Age for the PBS series “America at a Crossroads.” His productions on underrepresented groups, the military/media relationship, Cuba, conflict prevention and firearms violence have been recognized with more than a dozen national awards, including a CINE Golden Eagle to “Stand Up” for excellence in broadcast documentary.
Stephen Sapienza is a producer and writer of television programs for national and international distribution. Since 1992, he has produced documentaries for broadcast on PBS covering a wide range of military and global security issues, including the HIV crisis in Haiti, sex workers in the Dominican Republic, child soldiers in Sierra Leone, the Cuban military, and landmine survivors in Cambodia. He currently writes and produces for Azimuth Media's global affairs TV series Foreign Exchange. He became Co-Director of the non-profit production company Azimuth Media in 2001.
A short documentary film about the child labor activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner and the battle to end child slavery.
Director: Pankaj Johar
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Kailash Satyarthi
In this scripted feature film, a community activist unearths a hoard of corruption money and sets out to use the dirty cash to upgrade his community – however he inadvertently creates many more problems than he solves, meanwhile the corrupt official is hot on his trail.
Director: James Tayler and Atinkpo Elijah Segun
Producer: James Tayler, Joel Bolnick and Mohammed Zanna
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Slum Dwellers International
A feature documentary about legal practitioner Sonkita Conteh, who trains a team of “barefoot lawyers” that fight to overturn corrupt land sales agreements and restore the environmental integrity of their land.
Director: Jerry Rothwell and Tyson Conteh
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Namati
Open Heart is the story of eight Rwandan children who leave their families behind and embark on a life-or-death journey to receive high-risk open-heart surgery in Africa’s only free-of-charge, state-of-the-art cardiac hospital, the Salam Center run by Emergency, an Italian NGO. Their heart valves, damaged and weakened by rheumatic heart disease, which develops from untreated childhood strep throat, leave them lethargic and weak. Some of the children have only months to live.
During their cross-continental journey, Open Heart reveals the intertwined endeavors of Dr. Emmanuel Rusingiza, Rwanda’s lone, overworked public cardiologist, and Dr. Gino Strada, the Salam Center’s head surgeon. As one of Emergency’s founders, he must fight not just for the children’s lives but for the tenuous financial future of the hospital.
There are an estimated 18 million people afflicted with rheumatic heart disease and in need of urgent surgery, almost two thirds of them children, and the disease kills 300,000 people per year. Despite those facts, the Salam Center remains the only facility in Africa capable of such high-standard cardiac surgery, free of charge. Salam is key in Emergency’s plan to treat and reduce heart diseases in an area three times the size of Europe and home to 300 million people. The idea that “the Right to be Cured” should be accessible and free of charge to every member of the “human community,” is part of Emergency’s operating ethos. To accomplish that, the Center serves as a hub for the program for pediatrics and cardiac surgery that Emergency is implementing throughout its own medical facilities and local hospitals across Africa.
Producer Cori Stern has worked with Partners in Health for many years. The team scheduled their first production trip shortly before the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010 and has been filming the unfolding story of Partners in Health groundbreaking work since. While filming in Sudan, it became clear that the story unfolding on the ground merited its own film.
Kief recently completed Open Heart, which took him and a small crew to the heart of Rwanda and Sudan. He is concurrently filming a companion film about Dr. Paul Farmer and his organization Partners In Health, executive produced by Matt Damon and Damon Lindelof in collaboration with the Sundance Institute, Skoll Foundation and Tribeca Gucci.
He’s had international success from the award-winning feature-length documentaries, Kassim the Dream and The Devil’s Miner. Kief’s first feature, The Devil’s Miner, made its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival and won over 15 awards at international film festivals.
He began his filmmaking career as editor on the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Blood Ties: The Life and Work of Sally Mann. He is the recipient of two Emmy nominations for his editing work with National Geographic and earned the International Monitor Award for Best Editing on the journalistic film, What’s News? Kief is a member of the Director’s Guild of America and is based in Los Angeles, California.
Cori Shepherd Stern is a writer and producer, working in both documentary and narrative film. In addition to Open Heart, she is currently producing a feature documentary in collaboration with the Sundance Institute, Skoll Foundation and The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund about the revolutionary health care organization Partners In Health, also directed by Kief Davidson. Her other film projects include the major feature film release Warm Bodies directed by Jonathan Levine for Summit Entertainment and Lionsgate, and The Arizona Project for Miramax.
Beyond film, Cori is known for her work as a social change strategist and as a co-founder of STRONGHEART, an international residential community and accelerated learning lab for exceptional young people from extreme life circumstances across the globe including former child slaves, child soldiers, refugees, and other young survivors of conflict or poverty. The program – which has been called “R&D for brilliance in unlikely places” – combines groundbreaking neuroscience, social and personal change theory, and community psychology to affect significant change and create future influencers and advocates from exceptionally challenging backgrounds.
Cori’s work has been covered by BBC, CNN, NPR, and National Geographic among others. She was named O Magazine’s “Good Guy of the Month” and ABC World News “Person of the Week.”
The first installment of a documentary series about the Vezo of southwest Madagascar --one of the world’s last truly traditional fishing people and how overcoming the odds to protect their corals reefs and seafaring way of life.
Director: Garth Cripps
Advisor: Jerry Rothwell
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Blue Ventures
It all started by accident in 1969, when a Peruvian telenovela character worked her way out of poverty using a sewing machine; and suddenly sewing machines flew off the shelves by the thousands all over Peru. That incident, combined with the social modeling theories of psychologist Albert Bandura, demonstrating the power of fictional media characters to act as role models and influence behaviors of viewers, inspired a brilliant Mexican director named Miguel Sabido to create popular telenovelas designed both to entertain and to address urgent social issues. His first series were huge commercial hits and demonstrably contributed to skyrocketing enrollments in literacy classes and significant declines in population growth rates in heavily overpopulated Mexico. He revised and refined his formula until it became a scientific methodology that soon spread all over the world with success after success, and ultimately helped create an entire field, now known as Entertainment-Education. Sabido essentially created an affordable, exportable model for socially sustainable development, all while creating hit show after hit show. Like Sabido’s work, our documentary Poor Consuelo Conquers the World is both entertaining and solution-oriented in its approach to social change.
Storytelling, connecting with audiences via film and television with a goal of creating lasting social change is a core precept of the Stories of Change project. Poor Consuelo Conquers the World, looks at both historical and contemporary examples of Entertainment-Educational from a global perspective, ranging from Bolivia to Mexico, India to South Africa, and Afghanistan to the US. The focus is on empowering the poor and illiterate multitudes to make beneficial behavior changes that improve their daily lives. As one of the principal creators of this form of storytelling, Miguel Sabido’s innovation was to formalize the age-old notion of telling stories to educate a wide public, and adapt it for mass media in the form of telenovelas. He made it purposely entertaining but with specific aims that were often counter to the prevailing culture, such as a soap-opera addressing family planning at a time when family planning was illegal and even unconstitutional in Mexico. His family planning telenovela, made with the agreement of the government, the Catholic Church, and even the Communist Party, spurred a significant reduction in population growth rates in Mexico and persuaded India’s the-Prime Minister, Indira Ghandi, to invite Sabido to India to oversee the development of India’s first soap-opera, Hum Log. This lead to the creation of the first NGO dedicated to producing social-issue soap operas, PCI-Media Impact, now active in dozens of countries, and dozens of similarly dedicated NGOs/producers world wide including the Center for Media and Health in the Netherlends, the Vermont-based Population Media Council (PMC), Puntos de Encuentro in Nicaragua, The BBC World Service Trust in India, Search for Common Ground in Palestine and elsewhere, Soul City in South Africa, and many others.
Peter Friedman recently began shooting The Devil is in the Detail: Portrait of an Artist, an in-depth portrait of one of the world’s greatest and least famous artists at work. Friedman is also developing two features, Fatherless: A bipolar tragic-comedy and The Death of Philip Brooks. He has been making documentaries since 1980, when his first short was nominated for an Academy Award. Silverlake Life, in 1993, won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize among many other prizes, and is universally considered among the most important films ever made about AIDS. Death by Design, in 1995, is widely considered a landmark, and significantly influenced the way science is represented on film. Mana-Beyond Belief, (IDFA 2005), co-directed with Roger Manley, is a globally shot visual essay about the power of objects.
R. Paul Miller, now head of the Doha Film Commission in Qatar, produced of Snow Angels (2007), A Love Song for Bobby Long (2003), Prozac Nation (2000), Men with Guns (1998), and Lone Star (1993), as well as an associate producer on The Secret of Roan Inish (1994). In addition, Miller is Head of Production at Escape Pictures.
In 1984 Miguel Sabido, the father of Entertainment-Education (and the hero of Poor Consuelo), was invited by Indira Ghandi to develop and launch India’s first soap opera. Hum Log soared to the top of entertainment charts and drew a regular viewing audience of more than 50 million people. It also began to change family planning attitudes and practices thoughout India. The New York based NGO PCI-Media Impact was born, and to this day continues producing radio and television programs to promote family planning and many, many other issues in dozens of countries throughout the world.
During one of these programs a young character, Shandi, asked a question on the radio drama Taru that echoed throughout Bihar, India: Why don’t I have a birthday? See, little girls in Bihar didn’t celebrate their birthdays. Only boys did. Over the course of a few weeks, Shandi, aided by a social worker, Taru, planned and hosted her birthday party. Soon after the broadcasts, girls throughout Bihar began to celebrate their birthdays.
But the change didn’t stop there. Birthdays were symbolic of other inequalities – who went to school, who ate first, who received the best medical care. These things started changing too. An entire village decided it was time for all little girls to receive an education, so that year little girls got to go with their brothers to school.
Each of our 100 programs has a Shandi, someone who asks the seemingly simple question that transforms a society. These stories have reached 1 billion people in 34 countries. That’s the power of Entertainment-Education. We think it’s pretty cool and invite you to learn more by watching the video below and exploring the rest of our website.
“I was in prison before I was even born.” So begins the story of Dr. Victor Rios who, by 15, was a “dropout” and gang member with a death wish. But when a teacher’s quiet persistence, a mentor’s moral conviction, and his best friend’s murder converge, Rios’s path takes an unexpected turn. Rios’s story, interwoven with the stories of his mentors, proteges and, most importantly, 40 “pushout” youth in Watts, California, reveals that young people we know as “dropouts” are often pushed out of school by systemic forces beyond their control.
Director: Dawn Valadez and Katie Galloway
Producer: Dawn Valadez, Katie Galloway, and Daniella Sueuga
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Youthbuild USA
A film trilogy that tells the story of how our present day lived experiences of racial violence and discrimination reflect a long insufficiently acknowledged history of white racial oppression. The trilogy connects the impact of today's structural oppression on our communities in America with the legacy of slavery and white supremacy.
Director: Joe Brewster and Michele Stephenson
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Equal Justice Initiative
Rafea is a Bedouin woman who lives with her four daughters in one of Jordan’s poorest desert villages on the Iraqi border. She is given a chance to travel to India to attend the Barefoot College, where illiterate grandmothers from around the world are trained in 6 months to be solar engineers. If Rafea succeeds, she will be able to electrify her village, train more engineers, and provide for her daughters.
Even when she returns as the first female solar engineer in the country, her real challenge will have just begun. Will she find support for her new venture? Will she be able to inspire the other women in the village to join her and change their lives? And most importantly, will she be able to re-wire the traditional minds of the Bedouin community that stands in her way?
A 58-minute broadcast version of this film is currently available on YouTube, click to watch!
When Barefoot College founder Bunker Roy shared the stories of empowered grandmothers bringing the transformative power of light to their rural communities, he created a buzz of interest among documentarians on the lookout for a good story. Jehane Noujaim (Control Room, StartUp.com) didn’t wait for a commission. Jehane picked up her camera and headed to Africa to follow Roy, a distinguished looking Indian, sell the opportunity become solar engineers to a village in Mali. With founding support from the ‘Stories of Change’ partnership, the film will be part of the global documentary project Why Poverty?
Jehane Noujaim was raised in Cairo where she began her career as a photographer. Following a B.A. in Film and Philosophy at Harvard, she directed Mokattam (1998). Noujaim went on to produce and direct Startup.com (2001) in association with Pennebaker Hegedus Films and Control Room (2004). She was co-director on Shayfeen.com: We Are Watching You. Noujaim has also worked as a cinematographer on Born Rich (2003), Only the Strong Survive (2002), and Down from the Mountain (2002), and as executive producer on Encounter Point (2006) and Budrus (currently in release).
Mona Eldaief is a director, director of photography, and editor on documentary film and television projects around the world. Born in Cairo, Egypt and raised in the United States, she graduated from New York University with a degree in political science and photography. Her documentary feature credits include Control Room, A Wedding in Ramallah, and Her Name Is Zelda. Television credits include programs for PBS Frontline World , Discovery Networks, Travel Channel, ABC News, and MTV News and Docs. Mona is currently directing and shooting Barefoot Engineers, a documentary feature about a Bedouin woman from the northeastern desert in Jordan who is struggling against the Patriarchal rules of her society to get an education as a solar engineer in India and put the women of her village to work to help alleviate poverty.
Mette Heide is an award-winning producer and owner of +plus pictures ApS. She has worked as an executive producer for the past 16 years. She has most recently produced Last White Man Standing (2010), The Invention of Dr. Nakamats (2009) and Honestly, Mum and Dad (2009), the best selling format in Danish television history. She has also produced Little Miss Grown Up (2008), winner of the 2009 Danish Academy Award for Best documentary, Milosevic on Trial (2007), the 2008 Danish Academy Award winner for Best Documentary, and Liberace of Baghdad, winner of the Special Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. In 2008, Heide, along with Mette Hoffmann Meyer and Weijun Chen, won a Danish TV-Oscar for Please Vote for Me, as part of the award-winning series “Why Democracy?”.
Established in 1972, the Barefoot College is a non-governmental organization that provides basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable. These ‘Barefoot solutions’ can be broadly categorized into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development.
The College believes that for any rural development activity to be successful and sustainable, it must be based in the village as well as managed and owned by those whom it serves. Therefore, all Barefoot initiatives whether social, political or economic, are planned and implemented by a network of rural men and women who are known as ‘Barefoot Professionals’. With little guidance, encouragement and space to grow and exhibit their talent and abilities, people who have been considered ‘very ordinary’ and written off by society, are doing extraordinary things that defy description.
Children are saving lives in the slums of Calcutta. Amlan Ganguly doesn't rescue children; he empowers them to become change agents, battling poverty and transforming their neighborhoods with dramatic results. The Revolutionary Optimists follows Amlan and the children he works with – Shika, Salim, Kajal and Priyanka - on an intimate journey through adolescence, as they bravely fight the forces that oppress them. Using street theater, dance, and data as their weapons, the children have mounted vaccination drives to close the final mile with polio vaccination, turned garbage dumps into playing fields, and conducted education campaigns that have resulted in a significant drop in malaria and diarrhea in their neighborhood. Through intimate footage with the children, we witness not only the changes they are able to make in their neighborhood, but also the changes in the kids themselves.
Check here for upcoming special screenings.
In production since 2008, the Revolutionary Optimists has evolved into a short film, multi-platform tool as well as a feature film. In 2010 the filmmakers participated in the BAVC Producers Institute to develop Map Your World, an innovative way to track clean water and other public health issues. The short film, The Revolutionary Optimists, premiered a TEDx event, introduced by Melinda Gates. The feature film was part of the 2011 Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab at the Sundance Resort.
Maren Grainger-Monsen is a physician, filmmaker-in-residence and director and founder of the Program in Bioethics in Film at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. Maren directed Hold Your Breath (2007) and Worlds Apart (2003), a large-scale project on cross-cultural conflicts in medicine, which was broadcast on national public television and is currently being used in over 60% of US medical schools. Her film, The Vanishing Line (1998), exploring the art and issues of dying, was broadcast on the national PBS POV series. She won a regional Emmy Award for her film, Where the Highway Ends: Rural Healthcare in Crisis (1996). Maren studied film at the London International Film School, received her medical doctorate from the University of Washington and her emergency medicine residency at Stanford. She lives near Stanford with her husband, medical device entrepreneur and mandolin player Jeff Grainger, her two children Solenn and Tilson, and five chickens.
Nicole Newnham is a documentary filmmaker and writer, currently co-producing The Revolutionary Optimists with Maren Grainger-Monsen as a filmmaker-in-residence at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics Program in Bioethics and Film. Nicole recently co-produced and directed the critically acclaimed The Rape of Europa, about the fate of Europe's art treasures during WWII. Nicole was also nominated for a national Emmy Award for co-producing and directing the documentary Sentenced Home (2006) which follows three Cambodian refugees in Seattle who are deported back to Cambodia after 9/11. With Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Brian Lanker, she co-produced They Drew Fire (2000), a widely-acclaimed special for PBS about the combat artists of World War II, and wrote the companion book distributed by Harper Collins. Nicole graduated from Oberlin College and has a Master’s degree in Documentary Film from Stanford University. She lives in Oakland with her husband, education reformer Tom Malarkey, and her sons Finn and Blaine.
A qualified lawyer, Amlan began his career as an apprentice to the most reputed criminal lawyer in Calcutta. He was soon disillusioned with a legal system that provided little justice to the poor unable to pay fees and withstand the long drawn legal process.
In 1996, Amlan decided to make a complete switch and joined Lutheran World Service India. In 1999, Amlan registered Prayasam with a few friends with the intention of enabling children to participate in the decisions and factors that affect their lives. Under Amlan’s leadership, Prayasam has emerged as a regional expert and trailblazer in child rights programming and workshops. Amlan is best known for his use of popular media to engage and educate children in an interactive, problem-posing approach. A self-taught choreographer and fashion designer, Amlan incorporates both contemporary and traditional art forms into Prayasam’s alternative education models, which range from song, dance and comics to puppetry and storytelling. Amlan has made mentorship a hallmark at Prayasam, which has become a platform for introducing young people of diverse backgrounds to the social sector. Amlan is best known for his use of popular media to engage and educate children in an interactive, problem-posing approach.
This feature documentary follows the lives of formerly-incarcerated young men in New Orleans who confront systemic obstacles that historically have trapped them in cycles of poverty.
Director: Carl Byker
Producers: Carl Byker, Mike Seely
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Fundacion Paraguaya
To some she is a radical out for trouble. To others she represents a bright post-Taliban future. Sakena Yacoobi’s weapon of choice: books, which she deploys via the Afghan Institute for Learning, a grassroots organization she founded 12 years ago. Kirsten Johnson traveled to Afghanistan in 2009 to document Sakena’s work and AIF’s grassroots network to bring education to a wide cross-section of Afghans. Production ended after one research trip due to security concerns for the films subject and crew. A short film focusing on Sakena and AIL was created and premiered at the 2010 Skoll World Forum.
Producer Julie Parker Benello had been following the amazing work of Sakena Yacoobi before Sundance issues the ‘Stories of Change’ call for proposals. She enlisted acclaimed cinematographer and director Kirsten Johnson to take a research trip to Afghanistan during the escalation of the American offensive in Afghanistan. Kirsten’s trip was cut short due to security concerns for both the filmmaker and her subjects. But her commitment to capturing stories of coming of age in war-torn Afghanistan laid the foundation for her feature documentary I Dream Them Always.
Director / Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has travelled the globe capturing compelling images that convey the complexity of the human experience with artistry and intelligence. She is currently editing I Dream Them Always, which she shot and directed in Afghanistan. In the last year, as the supervising DP on Abby Disney and Gini Reticker's series, Women, War and Peace, she traveled to Colombia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan. She shared the 2010 Sundance Documentary Competition Cinematography Award with Laura Poitras for The Oath. She shot the Tribeca Film Festival 2008 Documentary winner, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. Her feature film script My Habibi was selected for the 2006 Sundance Writer’s Lab and Director’s Lab and is the recipient of an Annenberg grant. Her previous documentary as a director, Deadline, (co-directed with Katy Chevigny), premiered at Sundance in 2004, was broadcast on primetime NBC, and won the Thurgood Marshall Award.
Julie Parker Benello is a Co-founder of Chicken & Egg Pictures, a hybrid organization that matches money and mentorship to support women filmmakers dedicated to using their storytelling skills to address the global justice issues of our time. Julie has produced documentaries on health and environmental issues for more than a decade. In 2002, she co-produced the Sundance award-winning HBO documentary Blue Vinyl, co-directed by Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold. Prior to Blue Vinyl, Julie produced the documentary Prostate Cancer: A Journey of Hope, which aired nationally on PBS in 1999. She has worked as a Production Executive for the Distribution Company Non Fiction Films and as a Researcher for Walter Cronkite's documentary series Cronkite Remembers. She currently serves on the board of The Center for Environmental Health and The Global Fund for Women.
Professor Sakena Yacoobi is President and Executive Director of the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL), an Afghan women-led NGO she founded in 1995.The organization was established to provide teacher training to Afghan women, to support education for boys and girls, and to provide health education to women and children. Under Sakena’s leadership AIL has established itself as a groundbreaking, visionary organization which works at the grassroots level and empowers women and communities to find ways to bring education and health services to rural and poor urban girls, women and other poor and disenfranchised Afghans.
AIL was the first organization to offer human rights and leadership training to Afghan women. AIL supported 80 underground home schools for 3000 girls in Afghanistan after the Taliban closed girls’ schools in the 1990s.
AIL was the first organization that opened Women’s Learning Centers for Afghan women—a concept now copied by many organizations throughout Afghanistan. Using their grassroots strategies, AIL now serves 350,000 women and children each year through its Educational Learning Centers, schools and clinics in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A feature documentary that follows a seasoned Liberian activist as he attempts to change the current corrupt and nepotistic status quo by fighting against large scale resource extraction.
Director: Anjali Nayar
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Global Witness
Kenya has long been Africa’s success story—stable and ethnically harmonious.
After the presidential election in December 2007, everything changed. Voting controversy split the country along ethnic lines. A thousand people were killed and half a million displaced, pushing Kenya toward civil war, if not genocide. Dignitaries intervened, brokering peace, and establishing a fragile power-sharing government, but the post-election fallout persists. An alternative local response to the post-election violence seems superficial by comparison but is potentially more impactful: produce a TV soap opera series, hoping taboo storylines can bridge ethnic divisions and help transform a nation. Starting in December 2008, a Kenyan production company began work on a TV drama series, “The Team”, following the struggles of a fictional soccer team to overcome their ethnic differences, both on and off the pitch.
There’s inherent drama behind any TV production: will deadlines be met; will it be good; will it find an audience? But here the stakes are exponentially higher: if you don’t captivate an audience, you risk further losing your country.
All the ingredients for a compelling feature film are here: a skilled team of filmmakers; a stunning location; an unfolding process that is inherently visual and dramatic; an uncertain outcome that could have repercussions for both other conflicts and media’s potential to make a difference. A place ripe for transformation, but that’s also teetering on the brink. What can a soap opera achieve in this volatile context? Watch and see.
Patrick Reed first met Search For Common Ground founder John Marks and partner Susan Collin Marks at a Stories of Change Convening at the Skoll World Forum. Patrick attended subsequent convenings at the Sundance Film Festival and went into production in 2009. The Team was completed and had its world premiere at IDFA in 2010 followed by a special screening at the Skoll World Forum in March, 2011.
A decade ago, Patrick Reed abandoned a PhD program in History to work on documentaries, first as a writer/researcher, then as a director. Reed has collaborated with Peter Raymont on several White Pine Pictures’ award-winning productions over the years, playing a key creative role on Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire which won the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at Sundance 2006, and Best Documentary Emmy in 2007. Most recently, Reed directed the award-winning documentary Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma which had its North American premiere at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
Filmmaker, journalist and writer Peter Raymont has produced and directed over 100 documentary films and series during a career of 34-years. His films have taken him to Ethiopia, Nicaragua, India, Rwanda, the High Arctic and throughout North America and Europe. His documentary feature, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire was honoured with the 2005 Audience Award for World Cinema Documentaries at Sundance Film Festival and the 2007 Emmy Award for Best Documentary.
Raymont's most recent feature documentary film, A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, which premiered at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival; is an exploration of exile, memory, longing and democracy, seen through the experiences of the best-selling American-Argentinean writer and playwright. Raymont is also the Executive Producer of The Border, the new 13 episode, 1 hour, dramatic series on CBC television.
Founded in 1982, Search for Common Ground works to transform the way the world deals with conflict - away from adversarial approaches and towards collaborative problem solving. We use a multi-faceted approach, employing media initiatives and working with local partners in government and civil society, to find culturally appropriate means to strengthen societies' capacity to deal with conflicts constructively: to understand the differences and act on the commonalities.
Evicted from their land and homes by their in-laws, widows in Kenya are forced to live destitute with their children in empty market stalls, or even under trees out in the open. But now these women are coming together to fight for what is rightfully theirs – their land, their homes and their lives in this feature documentary.
Director: Heather Courtney
Social Entrepreneur Organization: Landesa
A mobile device that allows the college to deepen its impact in global communities by staying connected with its graduates.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Barefoot College
An animated short about the importance of properly managing healthcare waste to reduce negative impacts on human health and the environment.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
HealthCare Without Harm
Based on the true story of Francis Pii Kugbila, a husband, father and teacher in northern Ghana, this VR project addresses the importance of global mental health treatment..
Director: Scott Barker & Travis Hatfield
Producer: Zoë Adams & Chris Gernon
Social Entrepreneur/Organization: Basic Needs
An open-source digital storytelling platform that allows storytellers and activists to share stories about corruption and environment abuse globally, from remote locations and in multiple formats.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Global Witness
A short film focused on the idea that the healthcare system in general must address patients’ social needs in order to deliver on the promise of creating health.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Health Leads
A live-streaming storytelling platform that allows viewers to engage and intervene as active witnesses in human rights crises around the world.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Witness
A website enabled storytelling platform featuring farm families' stories for online communications strategy.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
One Acre Fund
An animated short about rheumatic heart disease prevention and treatment linked to a public health campaign in Rwanda.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Partners In Health
An animated video about a child freed from bonded labor and the campaign to end child slavery in the rug industry.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Goodweave
A short film about the value of "impact sourcing" in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Digital Divide Data
A series of short documentaries that profile members of Team Balika, a group of peer advocates who help girls enroll in and stay in school in rural India.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Educate Girls
A storytelling workshop that trains and empowers Tostan staff in Africa to produce documentary narratives.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
Tostan
A multi-touchpoint, interactive storytelling platform that lifts up the voices and leadership of YouthBuild's alumni community, placing YouthBuild USA at the center of a national conversation about the critical issues facing America's youth.
Social Entrepreneur/Organization
YouthBuild USA
The Stories of Change convening took place in October at the Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah. The convening is an intensive, story workshop that brings together documentary filmmakers and Skoll-support social entrepreneurs.
Organization Mission:
We rebuild tropical fisheries with coastal communities. Blue Ventures develops transformative approaches for catalysing and sustaining locally led marine conservation. We work in places where the ocean is vital to local cultures and economies, and are committed to protecting marine biodiversity in ways that benefit coastal people.
Our story started over a decade ago, surveying coral reefs in the Mozambique Channel. Vezo communities in southern Madagascar were concerned about the decline of their fisheries, so we supported one village to experiment with closing off a small section of their octopus gleaning area for a few months, to see whether this might boost productivity.
When the closure was re-opened, communities experienced a huge increase in octopus landings and fisher incomes. As news of this remarkable fishery boom spread, neighbouring communities started copying this approach. Crucially, this sparked interest in more ambitious coastal management efforts, leading to the creation of the country’s first Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) governed by a small network of fishing villages.
Since then, this temporary fishery closure model has gone viral along thousands of kilometres of Madagascar’s coastline, spawning a grassroots marine conservation revolution with 64 more LMMAs established to date. Today, 11% of the island’s seabed is managed by communities, for communities.
Our work is about much more than octopus. These experiences have guided our journey searching for new approaches to demonstrate that marine conservation can be in everyone’s interest, and that taking less from our ocean can give us much, much more.
Alasdair Harris, Executive Director
A marine ecologist with an unhealthy obsession for corals, Alasdair founded Blue Ventures to demonstrate that effective marine conservation requires pragmatic, entrepreneurial and community-based approaches to coastal management.
Within Blue Ventures Alasdair is responsible for coordinating conservation and research activities, leading an interdisciplinary and international team of conservationists, scientists and development practitioners. His work focuses on developing scalable solutions to marine environmental challenges, in particular pioneering approaches that make marine conservation make economic sense to coastal communities.
Alongside his work with Blue Ventures Alasdair is a visiting post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas, a member of the Marine Stewardship Council’s Stakeholder Council, and a technical advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme’s Convention on Migratory Species Secretariat.
Alasdair is a TED Fellow, an Ashoka Fellow, and 2015 winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. His work was highly commended by HRH the Duke of Cambridge in the 2013 inaugural Tusk Conservation Awards, and has twice been recognised by the UK Chancellor in the ‘Enterprising Young Brits’ awards. He has received the IUCN World Conservation Union’s Young Conservationist Award and the Condé Nast Environment Award, and been made an ambassador for Australia’s penguins.
Widely published both in peer reviewed literature and the wider media, Alasdair’s work has featured in the TED blog, the Telegraph and the Guardian here and here. Watch Alasdair speaking on BBC news, at the Do Lectures, WWF’s 2013Fuller Symposium, and the BBC’s World Challenge.
Garth Cripps, Photographer & Blue Forests Specialist
Garth has a strong interest in using photography to tell the human story behind conservation. He also supports Blue Ventures’ blue forests work, leveraging the enormous value of mangrove forests – from supporting fisheries to sequestering carbon dioxide – to protect these extraordinary ecosystems.
Garth has worked on some of the world’s most pioneering REDD+ projects with Conservation International, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the World Bank. He is a Kinship Conservation Fellow, and previously worked for the Zoological Society of London and WWF.
Organization Mission:
Throughout India, gender disparity remains a significant barrier to education. The result: more than 3 million girls across the country are out of school.
Founded in 2007, Educate Girls (www.educategirls.ngo) is a non-governmental organization that holistically tackles issues at the root of gender inequality in India’s educational system. With a focus on enrollment, retention and learning, Educate Girls aims to provide quality education for all under-served and marginalized girls by mobilizing and leveraging public, private, and community resources to improve access to education and school quality.
By leveraging the government’s existing investment in schools, Educate Girls delivers measurable results to a large number of beneficiaries and avoids duplication or parallel delivery of services. With operations in 7 gender-gap districts in Rajasthan, Educate Girls currently implements its programs in over 8,500 schools in over 4,500 villages. In the last seven years, Educate Girls has enrolled over 100,000 girls and over 390,000 children have demonstrated improved learning outcomes while there have been over 2.8 million total beneficiaries of its programmatic interventions.
Maharshi Vaishnav, General Manager, Development and Communications
I have 12 years of progressively responsible cross-functional experience in strategic communications, advocacy and international development. My work experience comprises leading the branding function at one of India’s most diversified business conglomerates and providing communications advisory services to Fortune 500 organizations at a global communications agency. My last stint prior to joining Educate Girls was a Fellowship with Grameen Foundation in South-East Asia. I hold graduate degrees in Public Policy (International Development) and Business.
Organization Mission:
Visayan Forum is a non-government organization established in 1991 in the Philippines, known for its innovations addressing modern slavery, especially human trafficking and domestic servitude. It is officially accredited to operate shelters and safe houses for trafficking survivors, where they are provided with counseling and rehabilitation, education support and skills training, and legal and medical support. VF creates and sustains community watch mechanisms, social movements, and social entrepreneurship initiatives to reduce the vulnerability of target communities. VF also operates as a resource center for research and knowledge management and policy advocacy.
Cecila Flores-Oebanda, President and Executive Director
Cecilia or “Nanay Day” to the survivors Visayan Forum cares for, is a globally – celebrated social entrepreneur and human rights activist. She is renowned for her courage and relentless pursuit of a society where people are free to explore opportunities without the risk of being exploited, abused, or enslaved.
A Freedom Fighter even in her youth, Cecilia dedicated her life to ending modern slavery by fighting for the Filipino people’s liberation from the tyranny of the Marcos regime, and eventually founding Visayan Forum after her release from being a political prisoner. Since then she has successfully established global best practices to fight human trafficking.
She is an Anti-Slavery Awardee, a Trafficking in Persons Hero, a Modern day Slavery Abolitionist, the recipient of the first Iqbal Masih Award for the Elimination of Child Labor, an Awardee of the World Children’s Prize and the 2013 Reuter’s Trustlaw Connect Impact Awardee. In 2013, Cecilia’s journey with survivors fighting to end modern slavery was featured by The CNN Freedom Project in a full-length documentary entitled “The Fighters".
Cecilia fervently believes that we can end human trafficking and modern slavery in this generation.
Kip Oebanda, Development Specialist
"Kip Oebanda, MDM, works on strategy, international networking and organisational development for the Visayan Forum in the Philippines. Kip was born in prison during the Marcos dictatorship. At 12, he led the first child-run radio programme in the country and won numerous national media awards. At 14, he spoke at international conferences on children’s rights all over the world and established Child Laborers and Advocates for Social Participation, an organisation of child labourers and advocates. The government recognised Kip through such awards as the Ninoy Aquino and Ten Outstanding Students of the Philippines. He now works in the Philippine film industry and is in pre-production for his second full-length film."
Organization Mission:
WITNESS trains and supports activists and citizens around the world to use video safely, ethically, and effectively to expose human rights abuse and fight for human rights change.
Mobil-Eyes Us is a project currently being incubated at WITNESS that aims to combine three disruptive technologies in the service of better social good engagement and activism: live video streaming (think Periscope), task-routing for under-utilized capacity within distributed networks of people (think Uber) and opportunity match-making on your phone (think Tinder).
We know that millions of people globally take actions for issues they care about - but often their only option is a click to donate or a petition. Often they don't feel connected to the issues or the actions and their action is not a good use of their skills, leverage or capacity. What if we could create a 'witnessing' corps of people ready to tune in live? What if, using live video, we could bring supporters into a human rights or other social justice situation at the right time to fully experience the reality? And ask them to use their unique skills, leverage, or networks to take action – for e.g. to deter illegal violence by their group presence, to rapidly share video material or invite others to act as well, or to provide direct legal guidance? Via an effective integration of technologies with storytelling and movement-building, we are building out prototypes to help people feel more experientially connected to causes they care about and then take actions that matter.
Sam Gregory, Program Director
Sam Gregory helps people use the power of the moving image and participatory technologies to create human rights change. He is the Program Director of WITNESS (www.witness.org), which aims to support millions of people to use video for human rights; he also teaches on human rights and participatory media as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Sam launched the Webby and Shorty nominated Human Rights Channel on YouTube, leads WITNESS’ work on the award-winning ObscuraCam and InformaCam tools and helped co-found the global Video4Change network. In 2015, he launched the ‘Mobil-Eyes Us’ initiative focused on combining the experience of live video with the power of on-demand APIs to drive more meaningful and useful global activism. He has worked on impactful campaigns worldwide and created a range of training programmes and teaching texts, including acting as lead editor on Video for Change: A Guide for Advocacy and Activism (Pluto Press, 2005). He has spoken widely at venues including the White House, SXSW, the Amnesty Global Activism meeting and TEDxEast, and publishes regularly in journals including Journal of Human Rights Practice, American Anthropologist and Information, Communication & Society.
Sam was a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident on the future of video-based advocacy, 2012 Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and in 2013 a 'Future for Good' Fellow at the Institute for the Future. Sam has an MA in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, attending as a Kennedy Scholar, and a BA from the University of Oxford.
Morgan Hargrave, Systems Change Coordinator
Morgan Hargrave is the Coordinator for WITNESS’ Systems Change work, a set of big-picture tools and advocacy that aims to help tailor the digital landscape to fit the needs of journalists, activists, and human rights witnesses of all stripes. He also works on the Video as Evidence and Video Advocacy Critical Response programs at WITNESS. Previously, he’s worked as an advocate, organizer, researcher, filmmaker, and project manager. A native Texan, he studied business and policy, first at Texas Tech University and then at Harvard.
Dawn Porter
Dawn Porter is a filmmaker, attorney and founder of Trilogy Films, which specializes in creating feature-length documentaries. Her directorial debut, Gideon’s Army, focused on public defenders working in the Deep South. The film premiered to critical and audience praise at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival where it won the award for Best Editing. Gideon’s Army broadcast on HBO and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and an Emmy. Her second film, Spies of Mississippi, aired on PBS’s Independent Lens to high ratings and critical acclaim in February of 2014. Dawn is an alumna of the Tribeca All Access program, where she won the 2011 juried Creative Promise Award. Realscreen named her one of 2012 Doc Hot Shots 15 Emerging Directors to Watch. She was awarded the San Francisco DocFest Best Director Award, and asked to give a keynote on the role of women and minorities in film at the International Documentary Association conference in the fall of 2014. Dawn is a Keppler speaker, traveling the country to address audiences on issues of judicial reform, civil rights, and indigent defense. She has appeared on The Daily Show with John Stewart, and is a returning guest on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry Show.
Leah Mahan
Leah Mahan is an independent documentary filmmaker whose work has been nominated by the Directors Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. Leah’s film Sweet Old Song (2002) was featured on the PBS series P.O.V. and was selected by film critic Roger Ebert to be screened at his Overlooked Film Festival (“Ebertfest”). She spent a dozen years making Come Hell or High Water: The Battle for Turkey Creek and was invited to work on the rough cut at the Sundance Institute Documentary Editing and Story Lab. The film won the Audience Award for Documentary Feature at the New Orleans Film Festival and aired on the PBS World Channel. In the spring of 2015 she traveled to Indonesia with Come Hell or High Water as a U.S. Film Envoy with the American FilmShowcase, a partnership between the Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Leah got her start in documentary filmmaking as an intern for filmmaker Henry Hampton on the PBS series Eyes on the Prize and her first film was Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street. Leah’s work has been supported by the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, Independent Television Service, Ford Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation. In addition to her independent filmmaking, Leah works with nonprofits on documentary storytelling strategy. After Hurricane Katrina, she worked with Gulf Coast community leaders and NGOs to create Bridge The Gulf, a community media project that lifts up the voices of Gulf Coast communities working towards justice and sustainability. She is currently a consultant to the Moving Forward Network on a project aimed at reducing harmful diesel emissions in frontline communities. She grew up in Oakland and lives in El Cerrito, CA with her husband and two children.
Jeremy Mendes
Jeremy Mendes is a Vancouver based artist with over 15 years experience working on interactive projects. He specializes in Creative Direction, Film Direction, Art Direction, Design and Illustration. His experience spans creative conceptual work, interactive design, filmmaking, writing and producing. Previous projects include the Webby award winning CBC Radio 3 web magazine. (archive.cbcradio3.com).
Projects with the National Film Board of Canada include This Land, Bear 71, The Last Hunt, Devil’s Toy Redux, and Seven Digital Deadly Sins. His work has received dozens of awards, including two Webby Awards, FWA Site of the Year and a Cannes Cyber Lion. These interactive projects capitalize on Jeremy’s collective experience — requiring an understanding of story, culture, art, design and interactive experience. Jeremy is invited to speak worldwide about this unique intersection and its manifestation through immersive interactive media.
Nicole Newnham
Nicole Newnham is a filmmaker and writer who recently co-produced and directed the Emmy-nominated Independent Lens documentary The Revolutionary Optimists, which inspired her to develop Map Your World (www.mapyourworld.org). Map Your World is an online community and storytelling platform for young changemakers that enables youth to leverage mobile technology to map data about issues they care about as the centerpiece of a campaign for change in their communities.
Previously, Nicole co-produced and directed the critically acclaimed The Rape of Europa, about the fate of Europe's art treasures during WWII. The Rape of Europa enjoyed a successful theatrical release, has been a much-broadcast PBS primetime special, was nominated for two national Emmys and a WGA award, and was shortlisted for the 2008 Documentary Oscar. Nicole was also nominated for an Emmy for co-producing and directing the documentary Sentenced Home, broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens, which follows three Cambodian refugees in Seattle who are deported back to Cambodia after 9/11. With Pulitzer-Prize winning photographer Brian Lanker, she co-produced They Drew Fire, a widely acclaimed special for PBS about the combat artists of World War II, and wrote the companion book distributed by Harper Collins.
Alicia Smith
Alicia Smith has been producing documentaries and non-fiction narratives on numerous platforms for 16 years, always with an eye to the creative application of story and form: the alchemy of ideas, point of view, experience and expression.
Alicia lives in Winnipeg and is a Producer for the National Film Board of Canada, where she works with filmmakers and artists from across the country in the creation of linear and interactive documentary, animation and photo-based audiovisual works.
Projects at the Board – ranging from POV films and interactive works by emerging Indigenous and Inuit filmmakers (God’s Lake Narrows), to multi-platform, international co-productions with The Guardian UK (Seven Digital Deadly Sins) – have received recognition from the Webby Awards, SXSW and IDFA.
Her early work (2000-2005) as part of team behind the media-rich weekly online magazine,CBCRadio3.com, broke new ground in interactive storytelling and garnered international acclaim over the course of its five-year run (archive.cbcradio3.com). While at the Canadian Broadcast Center, Alicia also worked on special projects outside of the Radio 3 unit. Her work as sole interactive producer, designer and web developer/programmer of Original Citizens, an online documentary created in collaboration with journalists from CBC Radio, received a world gold medal at the New York Festivals.
The seventh annual Stories of Change Convening took place in January at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The Convening is an intensive, story workshop that brings together documentary filmmakers and Skoll-supported social entrepreneurs.
Organization Mission: BasicNeeds’ mission is to enable people with mental illness or epilepsy and their families to live and work successfully in their communities by combining health, socio-economic and community orientated solutions with changes in policy, practice and resource allocation.
Main Organizational Goals: According to the World Health organization, 450 million people in the world suffer from mental illness. In developing countries roughly 90% of these people lack mental health care. BasicNeeds works in a number of developing countries, including India, China, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Nepal, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam, in order to improve lives of people living with mental illness. The organization prides itself on working with its beneficiaries rather than simply for them.
BasicNeeds uses a model – termed MHD (Mental Health and Development) – which aims to address people’s mental illnesses as well as their socio-economic challenges. This model breaks down into five independent elements: Capacity Building: identifying, mobilizing, sensitizing and training mental health and development stakeholders. Community Mental Health: enabling effective and affordable community oriented mental health treatment services. Livelihoods: facilitating opportunities for affected individuals to gain or regain the ability to work, earn and contribute to family and community. Research: generating evidence from the practice of mental health and development. Collaboration: managing partnerships and relationships with stakeholders who are involved in implementing the BasicNeeds MHD Model on the ground and/or are responsible for policy and practice decisions.
BasicNeeds has helped more than half a million people so far and through collaborating with local, national and international partners, aims to reach at least one million more people over the next five years.
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CHRIS UNDERHILL (Founder) is a global expert in the delivery of health and rehabilitation systems to very poor people. He is a serial social entrepreneur and his latest organisation, BasicNeeds, concerns the delivery of a holistic Model to mentally ill people and people with epilepsy in some of the poorest countries of the world. Chris is a Senior Fellow with the Ashoka Fellowship and is a recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. The BasicNeeds Model for Mental Health and Development is recognised as a significant innovation in community mental health care delivery combining medical, social, economic and personal aspects into one successful programme. Over 600,000 beneficiaries having been served in the BasicNeeds global programme. Previous organisations founded by Chris include Action on Disability and Development and Thrive, and in 2000 Chris was made an MBE by her Majesty the Queen for his services to disability and development.
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NATASHA ABRAHAM joined BasicNeeds in 2012 after completing her Masters degree in International Relations at the University of Warwick, UK. Prior to studying at Warwick, she graduated in Political Science from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai and then worked as a teacher with The Akanksha Foundation - a non-profit focusing on educating less privileged children in India. Natasha is currently BasicNeeds’ Communications Officer and supports the organisation to increase its profile and raise awareness of global mental health generally using a variety of appropriate communications channels.
Organization Mission: Associação Saúde Criança is a social organization that works to improve and maintain the wellbeing of children who live below the poverty line by fostering the economic and social self-sustainability of their families. Saúde Criança works in numerous cities across Brazil, including Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Pernambuco, Santa Catarina, Goias and Rio Grande de Sol.
Main Organizational Goals: The process begins when health professionals at partner hospitals identify children who come from families at social risk and send them to Saúde Criança. Upon joining the organization, the family works with a multidisciplinary team to create a Family Action Plan, which establishes the overarching goals to achieve self-sufficiency and the steps to reach them. The program covers five core areas:
HEALTH: Families receive free food, medicine, medical equipment, nutritional and physiological guidance and psychiatric support. They are also given courses on hygiene, family planning, substance abuse, violence, domestic abuse and child development. INCOME: The families, in particular the mothers, are given vocational training so that they can better sustain themselves over the long term. HOUSING: Saúde Criança provides building materials and labor to families who own homes in disrepair making them vulnerable to health risks. The goal is to create healthy living conditions by ensuring that houses meet the minimum standards of shelter, which includes having running water, sewage, tiled walls and floors, and a roof, among others. CITIZENSHIP: Saúde Criança’s legal department makes sure families are receiving every right they are entitled to. They give guidance on legal issues and on how to obtain official documents and government benefits. Our legal staff also make sure all the adults in the family have all the basic documents issued by the local authorities. EDUCATION: This program works to ensure that children of school age get an education. It requires participating families to prove that their children are enrolled in school. If they are unable to do so, Saúde Criança takes the necessary steps to get the children to school.
Research has shown that Saude Criança’s FAP model can reduce hospitalization rates by 60%, increase the income of assisted families by more than 35%, and lead to significant annual savings in public spending.
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Vera Cordiero, founder and CEO of the organization, is a social entrepreneur and physician. Associação Saúde Criança, founded in 1991 by Dr. Vera Cordeiro is a not for-profit, nongovernmental, non-religious organization that works together with public hospitals breaking the cycle of readmissions of critically ill children from low-income, high-risk environments. ASC’s work has been responsible for a 60% decrease in re-hospitalization days among assisted families, 38% increase in average family income and significant annual savings in public spending which helps keep more hospital beds open to those who truly need them. For its transparency, impact and wide applicability has been rewarded various prizes by institutions from around the world. Vera Cordeiro is globally recognized for her groundbreaking work in social inclusion. She is an Ashoka fellow, a Skoll Foundation and Schwab Foundation social entrepreneur, and an Avina leader. She is member of the World Council of Ashoka and from 2005 to 2011 a Board member of PATH: A Catalyst for Global Health.
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Cristiana Velloso is COO at Saúde Criança, where she is in charge of the communications, fundraising and products area. She is also a member of the executive committee that leads the association. She graduated from the University of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) with a bachelor degree in nutrition in 199. She did in 1994 an extension course in Marketing (IAG MASTER, PUC-RJ) and in 2004 an extension course in Social Entrepreneurship and the Third Sector. After graduation in 1992 she worked in a public hospital in Rio (Hospital de Ipanema) and in 1994 at a school for the blind. She was co-owning and administrating a pastry shop in Rio. She came to Saúde Criança as a volunteer in 1999 and became an employee in 2006, first as a project’s coordinator and since 2008 as the COO.
Organization Mission: Just as the Hippocratic Oath promises to, “first, do no harm,” health care providers have a responsibility to eliminate practices that harm people and the environment. Healthcare Without Harm is an international coalition of 473 organizations in over 50 countries that share a vision of a health care sector that does no harm, and instead promotes the health of people and the environment. The overall mission of Health Care Without Harm is to transform the health care sector worldwide, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment.
Main Organizational Goals: The organization’s 8 main goals are to create markets and policies for safer products, materials and chemicals in health care. Promote safer substitutes, including products that avoid mercury, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic and brominated flame retardants. Eliminate incineration of medical waste as well as minimize the amount of toxicity of all waste generated. Transform the design, construction and operations of health care facilities to minimize environmental impacts and foster healthy, healing environments. Encourage food purchasing systems that support sustainable food production and distribution, and provide healthy food on-site at health care facilities. Secure a safe and healthy workplace for all health care workers. Ensure patients, workers and communities have full access to information about chemicals used in health care and can participate in decisions about exposures to chemicals. Promote human rights and environmental justice for communities impacted by the health care sector, while assuring that problems are not displaced from one community or country to another. Address climate change by improving energy practices and reducing the overall climate footprint of the health care sector.
Gary Cohen has been a pioneer in the environmental health movement for thirty years. Cohen is Co-Founder and President of Health Care Without Harm and Practice Greenhealth. He was also instrumental in bringing together the NGOs and hospital systems that formed the Healthier Hospitals Initiative. All three were created to transform the health care sector to be environmentally sustainable and serve as anchor institutions to support environmental health in their communities.
Cohen is a member of the International Advisory Board of the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal, India. He is also on the Boards of the American Sustainable Business Council, Health Leads and Coming Clean.
Cohen has received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded Cohen an Environmental Merit Award. In 2013, he was awarded the Champion of Change Award for Climate Change and Public Health by the White House.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-h-cohen/preventative-health-care_b_4603604.html
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Michelle Gottlieb has been the co-coordinator of Health Care Without Harm’s National Healthy Food and Healthcare Program for the past 5 years, and co-coordinates the Food Matters Clinical Education and Advocacy Program. She has also worked with HCWH’s Safer Chemicals Program. Formerly she was the Co-Executive Director of Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility where she specialized in children's health, women's health and reproductive health. She worked with pediatric care providers from around the country to develop the Pediatric Environmental Health Toolkit, to assist pediatric caregivers in incorporating environmental health into their practice. Prior to moving to the Boston area she helped develop a new program on Health, Environment, and Development at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C. She holds a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and a Master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies where she focused on environmental public health and policy.
Organization Mission: VisionSpring’s mission is to provide affordable eyewear to people living in developing countries. Since worker productivity is often hampered by loss of vision or poor eyesight, VisionSpring aims to increase worker productivity as well as the GDP in the areas they operate in.
Main Organizational Goals: According to research, uncorrected vision results in a loss of 202 billion dollars a year in the global economy. People who can’t see simply can’t work, or often at a low level of productivity. Furthermore, 90% of people with impaired vision live in developing countries. Unfortunately, glasses are not only expensive, but also simply unavailable in the parts of the world where they are needed most. In order to combat this problem, VisionSpring works to provide glasses and other vision products to low-income residents of these developing countries at an extremely reduced cost. VisionSpring trains vision entrepreneurs in local communities so that they can conduct vision tests and match clients with appropriate products. Individuals who need more specialized care are referred to a nearby optometrist. VisionSpring’s model has been lambasted by some critics who pose the question “why sell glasses when you can donate recycled pairs?” First of all, numerous jobs are created by allowing these vision entrepreneurs to sell the glasses. In addition, distributing recycled glasses is far more costly and the final product is far inferior. Finally, there is no “one size fits all” in vision correction so the recycled glasses are often given out to people who don’t need that particular kind of pair.
A study done in 2007 by the William Davidson institute at the University of Michigan found that VisionSpring glasses improved productivity of its recipients by roughly 35%. Furthermore research also suggested that the glasses could improve monthly income by up to 20%. Considering the $4 initial investment (cost of glasses to consumer) and a $2 average daily wage, this would result in a 108 dollar annual increase or a 2600% return on the patient’s investment.
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Kevin Hassey joined VisionSpring in 2011 as President of the organization, and was promoted to CEO in 2012. He is responsible for all the organization’s operations as well as its strategic direction to ensure allcan see well. He is a 20-year veteran of the optical business, and previously led retail and brand marketing for Luxottica Group’s Lenscrafters business unit and served as President of LCA Vision. During his tenure, Lenscrafters achieved over 30 consecutive quarters of same store sales growth, becoming the leader of optical retailing in America. Under Mr. Hassey’s leadership, LCA Vision became the largest American retailer of Lasik vision services by growing its market capitalization from $100 million to more than $1 billion. Mr. Hassey received an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and holds a degree in marketing from Boston College.
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Peter Eliassen is the COO of VisionSpring where he manages global operations. Prior to joining VisionSpring, Peter held positions at Unilever, Capital One, the United Nations and served in the US Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa. Peter graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Economics and received his MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management. Peter has traveled to more than 65 countries, speaks French and Spanish fluently, and enjoys trail running and global adventuring with hiswife and daughter Finley.
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Nicole Newnham is a returning Media Advisor with Skoll Stories of Change. She is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and a founder of Actual Films in San Francisco. Nicole is the co-producer and director of the feature documentary The Revolutionary Optimists and the companion interactive web platform MAP YOUR WORLD, funded by Tribeca FIlm Institute, Sundance, and the Gates Foundation. She co-produced They Drew Fire, a widely-acclaimed film for PBS about the combat artists of World War II, and co-wrote the companion book, which is distributed by Harper Collins. She was associate producer of Eye of the Storm (1997), a cinema verité profile of United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan that was distributed worldwide by the BBC. Ms. Newnham has been associate producer and line producer on several US/UK co-productions for Discovery/The Learning Channel, including a four-part series on the art of survival science; and the Emmy-nominated The Human Sexes with Desmond Morris (1996). In 1994, Nicole graduated from the Documentary Film Program at Stanford University.
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Pete Nicks feature documentary, The Waiting Room, which chronicles a day in the life of an Oakland, Calif., hospital waiting room, was released in 2012 to critical acclaim. It was named by the San Francisco Film Critics Circle as the best documentary of 2012 and shortlisted for an Academy Award. The Washington Post named The Waiting Room one of the "10 best films of 2012," and the film garnered numerous accolades, including the Stella Artois Truer Than Fiction filmmaking grant, Gotham IFP and Independent Spirit Award nominations for best documentary, and a Cinema Eye nomination for best debut feature. Pete was invited to speak at TEDxMaastrich in 2012 and at the Mayo Clinic's TRANSFORM conference in September 2013. Prior to his recent work in film, Nicks worked in television for several years and earned an Emmy for "Blame Somebody Else," which explored human trafficking during the Iraq War. Nicks is now developing the second of a trilogy of character-driven films exploring health care, crime and education in Oakland. Nicks received his B.A. in English from Howard University and his M.A. in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley.
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Cori Stern is a veteran of Stories of Change, she is a writer and producer, working in both documentary and narrative film. In addition to Academy Award-nominated short Open Heart, she is currently producing a feature documentary in collaboration with the Sundance Institute, Skoll Foundation and The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund about the revolutionary health care organization Partners In Health, also directed by Kief Davidson. Her other film projects include the upcoming major feature film release Warm Bodies directed by Jonathan Levine for Summit Entertainment and Lionsgate, and The Arizona Project for Miramax. Beyond film, Cori is known for her work as a social change strategist and as a co-founder of STRONGHEART, an international residential community and accelerated learning lab for exceptional young people from extreme life circumstances across the globe including former child slaves, child soldiers, refugees, and other young survivors of conflict or poverty. The program – which has been called “R&D for brilliance in unlikely places” – combines groundbreaking neuroscience, social and personal change theory, and community psychology to affect significant change and create future influencers and advocates from exceptionally challenging backgrounds. Cori’s work has been covered by BBC, CNN, NPR, and National Geographic among others. She was named O Magazine’s “Good Guy of the Month” and ABC World News “Person of the Week.”
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Deborah Alden is a design researcher, strategist & educator, Deborah believes that engaging and understanding people and their communities is the key to creating lasting impact. For 15 years, she has worked closely with and within organizations to unearth opportunities that evolve their offerings. Clients have ranged from Fortune 100 companies to non-profits and start-ups across industries including healthcare, financial services, cultural, government, tech and education. A perennial nomad with a background in social entrepreneurship, communication design and architecture, she often works in cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary contexts, bringing structure and clarity to complex situations in the development of effective systems, services, stories and strategies.
Deborah is Co-Founder of The Comradery and has taught design and research in Singapore, México and currently at IIT's Institute of Design in Chicago. She also designed and led the pilot year of Firebelly U, an incubator for designers starting social enterprises and was a coach for Design for America.
Jeff Skoll created the Skoll Foundation in 1999 to pursue his vision of a sustainable world of peace and prosperity.
Led by CEO Sally Osberg from 2001 to 2018, and now led by Interim President Richard Fahey, our mission is to drive truly transformative change—equilibrium change—by supporting the social entrepreneurs who recognize the systems in need of change and then advance social progress by developing powerful models for change that disrupt a suboptimal status quo and transform our world for the better.
By identifying the people and programs already bringing positive change around the world, we empower them to extend their reach, deepen their impact, and fundamentally improve society on a local to global scale. Since 1999, the Skoll Foundation has led the charge for social entrepreneurship, buoyed by the knowledge that social entrepreneurs are the world’s best bet for solving some of world’s thorniest problems.
The Skoll Foundation has invested approximately $470 million worldwide, including the Skoll Award to 128 social entrepreneurs and 106 organizations on five continents.
Click here to learn more about the innovative organizations run by Skoll supported social entrepreneurs.
