Okay, so I’m going to set the stage here. It’s June 1993, and I’m sitting in my office in Manhattan. I’m the newly minted executive producer of the documentary series POV. And I’m feeling very strong mixed feelings. On one hand, I am super proud because the show that we put on for opening night on PBS nationwide with Silver Lake Life the View from here, a powerful, vivid video diary of a couple with AIDS, one of whom essentially dies on camera. And the other part of me is feeling kind of anxious, and I’m preparing for backlash. Because exactly a year ago, POV had aired another gay love story, and the Christian right came after us, and they came after us hard. And it wasn’t just POV. They came after the National Endowment for the Arts. They came after PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And I was still kind of shaken. Sure enough, my assistant comes in, and she says, there’s a homemaker from Utah on the phone. She wants to talk to you now, and she doesn’t sound happy. Pick up the phone. She says, are you the person that made the decision to put that show on last night? And I said, yes. She said, well, we don’t have many homosexuals here in Utah. I paused. She said, my husband died of cancer last year, and that was my story too. We talked a little bit more. She said goodbye. We thanked each other. And it made me realize, you know, how could she have known that gay people loved each other given what the media was saying about the LGBT community in the early 90s? She’d made an assumption that they were the other. And then I realized I’d made an assumption too, because I thought she was calling to beat me up. So Silver Lake Life is the kind of story that brings people together across values, powerful values, in this case like family and everlasting love and commitment. And it kind of brings people of different shapes and perspectives into a common place. And as we thought about this at Active Voice Lab, it was kind of like a rake, right? Didn’t go deep under the surface. Under the surface didn’t talk about the epidemiology of the AIDS epidemic. There was certainly no call to action, but it operated under these stunning universal human values. We started to think about this metaphor a little bit more. So why would we want a metaphor for storytelling? Well, if you look around at this group, and I’m blown away by everything that you’re doing, there’s a tremendous amount of sophistication in the way our field is now using stories to advance social change. So much so that it’s so far ahead of our language, right? So at least from the kind of production and implementation side, we think about documentary, or we think about feature narrative, or we think about persuasive video. Those are products. Just to me, we also need to think about what these stories are great at, what they do, how they contribute to social justice. And that’s a little bit about this metaphor for. I want to apologize to you that aren’t gardeners. I’m going to describe what these tools do for the New Yorkers in the room. And I also want to thank Frank, because this is the first time I’ve talked about this in various parts of the world. This is the first time I’ve had a gazebo to talk in front of, so I’m really happy here. OK, so Silver Lake Life dealt with the ambiguity of life and death, the nuance of relationships, and that is really great when you’re bringing people together. But sometimes you want a trowel. And for those of you that don’t know the trowel, a trowel is a little handheld device. It’s a pointy tip, and you use it to plant a seed, right? So the trowel knows exactly where it’s going. Why would you use a trowel? If you’ve got your base, you need to mobilize them, and you’re going to tell them what to do. Here’s the problem. Here’s a solution. So if you may have been at Sundance, this film premiered there, an inconvenient sequel. And this is not a film that’s trying to get climate deniers onto our side. That’s just not what it’s for. But it’s very, very effective in building the base and identifying what’s happening now and moving people to policy. And in terms of building that base, it’s absolutely important, because as we’ve talked about this week, people have a lot going on, and films like a trowel-like inconvenient sequel are absolutely essential. And you need to use them for those purposes. But you wouldn’t necessarily start with a rake in that situation. You’re talking to people that are agreeing with you. And that’s not sufficient either, right? Sometimes as Bridget Evans, I thought, described beautifully yesterday, this notion of popular culture is absolutely profound. It’s the kind of resource that helps us develop that kind of cultural change, long-tune, attitudinal change. So we think of those as wheelbarrows. Wheelbarrows transport you. They take you away. And the social issue plays a supporting role. It’s not the dominant role. So I went to see hidden figures because someone invited me to an early screening, right? Other people went to see hidden figures because they love Janelle Monet or Ferrell Williams who produced it. Some people love science, and they went to see this movie. And others love local modern history. So lots of people came to see hidden figures. And something happens when you have these messages out there, not just in the lives and the minds and the memories of people who go and then move on in their lives, but there’s also a reverberating effect that happens in popular culture. So when E. Online asked Janelle Monet to talk a little bit about why the film was important, here’s what she said. She gave a message of solidarity in the entertainment press. So wheelbarrows that transport us are extremely important. And sometimes there’s an even bigger notion. The film Selma, which came out last year, did have those transport of qualities, right? It had the relationship Martin Luther King with his wife, his allies, with President Johnson, those that was a profound narrative structure. But it did something else. It lifted up the civil rights movement. It showed strategy. It showed how hard it was. It showed how vigilant the leaders worked. And how there were ups and downs. And if you think about that, lifting the movement up, and I’m going to have to go into a little bit of description now, it’s maybe like a trellis. And for those of you that don’t know about trellises, it happens. They’re these wooden or metal structures that help the plants climb up and see the light. And trellises in this time, when there’s more organizing than ever, more and more people getting into the movement, are absolutely essential. And they’re not always feature films. A lot of the work that you’re doing deal with trellises, where they’re actually showing how grantees and activists and allies actually do their work every day. I understand that Black Lives Matter used portions of Selma to train leaders in Ferguson. Ford Foundation and business leaders around the country made it possible for 125,000 youth to see this movie for free. Why would they do that? Well, one businessman in St. Louis contributed money so local kids could see this because he wanted to show them about systemic change. They give hope. Trellises give hope. They give us the hope for the long-term change and the struggle every day. These are all on our website, by the way. And there’s a few others. There’s shovels, investigative films that dig for the truth. They’re incredibly effective for policy change, for getting policymaker and headlines. There’s sprinklers, the newest edition, which are multimedia platforms often, where there are multiple stories about a common experience. I have to go on record to say that there was another tool that was eliminated because of the filmmaker group that advises me. And that was the Sledgehammer. I thought it was very important to include, but they thought it might be derogatory, so it’s not. And I want to make sure it’s clear that this is a metaphor. It’s not a manifesto. These are just ways that we can talk with each other and talk with our allies about what it is that we’re trying to do and to pivot when we need to if we’re not getting what we think we should. Most stories don’t have a single tool associated with them. They’re hybrids. I love Eva DuVernay’s 13th. And I know it’s going to be used as a way to organize against mass incarceration, to train leaders, to lift up movements. There are lots of ways that we can use the content. The point is that we have to use it effectively. We have to know what we’re talking about, what we’re looking for, and what kind of stories match those objectives. This started with a conversation with a homemaker in Utah, and it was so wonderful to see at the Women’s March thousands of women in Salt Lake City marching, women who were quoting Susan B. Anthony and the ACLU. This is a time for us. And I also want to say that at the very beginning when I mentioned that in 1993 in POV, I was scared. I was scared that people weren’t going to like the story that I felt really need to be told. I have learned so much from so many of you, and I’m not scared anymore. I’m really mad, and I’m ready to fight, and I think we can all sharpen our tools. So thank you very much.