Connecting People to Policy: Storytelling as a tool for progressive change
Too often advocacy organizations will wrap complex policy issues in focus-group tested messaging without honestly connecting with the people most affected. People’s stories and voices are incredibly powerful and compelling, and may be able to accomplish what email outreaches, blogs and social networking cannot: humanize progressive reform, capture the attention of new supporters, and build a diverse and powerful outcry for change. The challenge for progressives is to use storytelling to pierce the static of advocacy messaging, and inspire more people to get behind meaningful and lasting reform. This session features the creative work of new-documentarians, people who are using the power of storytelling through video and new Web applications to let people’s stories drive large audiences to support policies that solve real-world problems.
Karr is the Campaign Director for Free Press -- the largest nonprofit organization devoted to media and technology policy in the US. He oversees all campaigns and online outreach efforts, including SavetheInternet.com and our work on public broadcasting, propaganda, and journalism. Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of the Globalvision News Network. He has also worked extensively as an editor, reporter and photojournalist for the Associated Press, Time Inc., New York Times and Australia Consolidated Press. Tim critiques, analyzes and reports on media and media policy for the Huffington Post and on his personal blog, MediaCitizen.
Wendy Cohen is the Manager of Community and Alliances at Participant Media in Los Angeles. In February 2006, she co-founded Screening Liberally and is currently the National Director and part of the National Leadership of Living Liberally. Later that year, she became the first Community Manager at the Huffington Post. Wendy produced her first short documentary film about bees in 2008 which was hailed as a “better bee movie” by New York Magazine and has received awards from the Clif Bar Family Foundation and W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
Robert Greenwald is a producer, director and political activist. Greenwald is founder/president of Brave New Films, a new media organization that uses moving images to educate, influence, and empower viewers. Under Greenwald, BNF has produced dozens of videos on social justice and political issues which have been viewed over 40 million times and forced pressing issues into mainstream media. Greenwald is currently directing Rethink Afghanistan, a documentary about the dangers of military escalation in Afghanistan. Greenwald is also the director/producer of several documentaries including: Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism.
Crissy has worked as the Program Coordinator producing web content and managing web outreach at Breakthrough for over three years. In addition, her online reach includes being a freelance writer for many websites during off hours. Prior to working on the web, offline Crissy worked in documentary production at Court TV. Crissy has her Masters in Television, Radio, and Film from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Journalism from the University of Rochester.
Megan is the Director of “America Offline” an online video series that tells the stories of people living on the wrong side of the digital divide. Prior to joining Free Press, Megan was a national political reporter for In These Times magazine, a staff reporter and editor for The New Standard, and worked extensively as a freelance journalist.
