New Visual Tools for Social Change

By Phoebe Eng, Director of Creative Counsel
The 1000 Voices Archive, 1000VoicesArchive.org, is a new, non-profit video content site that promotes local community leaders as powerful civic voices. Produced by the strategic communications and media organization, Creative Counsel, and co-presented by The Fledgling Fund, the 1000 Voices Archive is now working with foundations and advocate networks, identifying, creating, and promoting vignettes that demonstrate the vibrancy and cooperation of local communities nationwide.

The 1000 Voices Archive is a destination site for advocates and filmmakers who are interested in impacting policies and activating civic participation through the power of video stories. The platform features video stories told by diverse storytellers, each sharing an important story in their lives that evokes the values they believe in most.

While our site receives thousands of page views each day, this Archive is focused on becoming the leading site for advocates, community leaders, and media makers who are looking for well-produced, easily accessible video stories that put a human face and on the issues they work on every day.

Stories + Tools = Change
1000 Voices Archive stories cover a range of issues, from environmentalism, to racial justice, immigration, health care, education, and leadership. Viewers experience people they may not often encounter personally: immigrants, the working poor, veterans, artists, the previously incarcerated, business owners, hockey moms, and others who may seem very different from the viewer at first, but who ultimately demonstrate a set of shared values.

Our stories are not public service announcements, industrial videos, YouTube citizen journalism, or campaign ads. Instead they are intimate moments where viewers experience a real person sharing a pivotal moment in their lives - a lesson learned, a rite of passage, or a call to action. It is those moments, coupled with a set of interactive social dialogue tools, that make the 1000 Voices Archive distinctive, providing a media and technology platform that activates public conversations on a range of social justice themes.

Why Filmmakers and Advocates Enjoy this Archive
Award-winning filmmakers have been exceptional in their offers and enthusiasm to work with us. They see how their work can automatically be translated into real, tangible advocacy change through our outreach efforts and the 12 interactive tools (such as letter writing templates, networking tools, and an “e-print shop” that enables viewers to print screening posters and post web banners to the videos) that accompany each story.

Some of the nation’s most effective advocacy networks are helping us identify their most compelling storytellers because they have seen how our story narratives can help them move policies and shape public dialogue in local townhalls, community meetings, with Beltway staffers and policymakers.

The Extra “Value Added” – PR Muscle. Filmmakers and advocates also appreciate the substantial strategic PR and outreach efforts that we provide for our stories - we have created a strategic communications process that promotes our stories to the press, so that they become the basis of news and feature articles that reach new audiences. Last month’s Miami Herald story is just one example of how our stories are leveraged in the news.

Several Recent Accomplishments
Launched on July 4, 2008, 1000 Voices Archive video stories have already been used with great success at town hall discussions, with arts and education groups, and health and interfaith networks. And with our PR and outreach capacity, our stories are:

Training New Leaders
Our exciting partnership with Florida's Human Services Coalition has resulted in story screenings at several conferences this summer aimed at teaching immigrants and community leaders how to activate the power of multimedia stories for measurable policy change. In Florida, we are focusing on the stories of Florida's immigrant communities and communities of color across a range of issues. Our stories are already inspiring dozens of Miami’s informal community leaders to become more visible organizers and civic participants in local public policy discussions.

Helping Advocates Talk to Decisionmakers
In a few short months we've created and promoted over a dozen stories in close partnership with the MultiState Working Families Coalition, helping to put a human face on policies that affect low-wage workers in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Jersey, New York, Maine, and California. Our storytellers come from states where workplace policies are being vigorously discussed, and we will soon be in several other states, to shape, produce, and promote stories from business owners, to low wage workers, doctors, faith leaders, parents, and others. Laws and policies are gaining momentum in several states, and public dialogue is coalescing in several community gatherings with the help of our stories.

Helping School Programs and Policy Educators
Educators are beginning to use our 1000 Voices Archive as a tool in their classrooms. We're particularly excited that professors teaching social studies, civics and media production at the high school level, and health policy, corporate social responsibility, filmmaking, and labor law at graduate levels, have already begun integrating our stories in their Fall course curricula. Discussions are now in progress to create a customizable 1000 Voices Archive course curricula.

How To Work With the 1000 Voices Archive
Creative Counsel and the 1000 Voices Archive invite you to give us your suggestions for potential advocacy partners and story themes. The 1000 Voices team works with our advocate partners "from soup to nuts," from identifying and framing each story, to creating goal-driven outreach plans for each of them. We feel that’s why our stories are so successful.

Fundamentally we are communications strategists with community-building and advocacy expertise, and we'd love to share with you our comprehensive and hybrid approach to storytelling, framing, production, and promotion that ensures significant, measurable, and meaningful social justice impact.

We hope that you share 1000 Active Voices with your colleagues, and contact us about how your grantees' or foundation's stories might be included in the Archive to strengthen mission effectiveness and build communications capacity.

We invite you to stay connected and learn with us. If you'd like to schedule a chat with Creative Counsel’s Executive Director, Phoebe Eng, click here.

Click here for an overview of the 1000 Voices Archive. For a sample of our technology and programming expertise, take a look at our 1000 Voices interactive video map here.