Storytelling and social justice in action

Today, collaborations between documentaries and community organizations often happen within a particular model—by building organizational partnerships around individual films, whereby filmmakers and their impact teams work closely with issue advocacy groups to reach the people most affected by the stories they are telling. A different model seeks to empower nonprofit community organizations with the tools and training to leverage documentary storytelling regularly and consistently in their efforts to engage publics and constituents around social issues. In this way, the hope is for nonprofit organizations to add the power of intimate documentary storytelling to their strategic toolboxes. This report examines this idea through a focused year-long experiment with this model, an initiative called Putting Films to Work.