Introduction

"A video cannot change things for you, okay. You can't sit in front of a video and it talks about changing your neighborhood and when you go home it's going to have changed. It's going to be the same. A video is a tool to unite people and bring out ideas on a certain issue that the video might be trying to show. A video is a motivational tool, definitely. It can educate people and that's what's important."

(Carol Roman, age 21, Educational Video Center)

What is advocacy video?
This report tells the stories of advocacy videos and television programs which have motivated people to change their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries, and the laws which govern them.

Advocacy programming is created out of the desire to improve society. It is made to provide housing for the homeless, to protect someone from AIDS, to stop a bulldozer from destroying a forest. A camera can't build a house and a videotape can't stop a chainsaw, but people using video can—and do. Moving pictures convey the reality of social issues like nothing else, and as video technology has become widely available, activists throughout the world have discovered one of their most valuable tools.

The relative affordability of video equipment enables individuals and nonprofit organizations to control the means of production. People are using home video cameras to document irrefutable evidence of injustice in their own backyards. Community groups and nonprofits are creating programs to mobilize the public in grassroots and national efforts. The power of television images to evoke emotion, combined with the ability of activists to inspire action, creates a uniquely potent catalyst for change.

Advocacy video can reach people in every conceivable meeting place in civil society, in our homes, schools, churches, and libraries. Showing a videotape is one of the easiest ways for a concerned citizen or a field organizer to initiate political debate. Advocacy video serves as a portable town hall meeting that can be called to order anytime, anywhere.

Advocacy television can be found across the television dial: from local cable access stations to national networks. Without the resources to buy television time, activists have found access points to the airwaves. But advocacy television involves much more than winning a coveted hour of time on public television. Organizations have learned how to transform individual broadcasts into extensive public education and grassroots organizing opportunities.

No single report can capture the full breadth and depth of the advocacy video field for activists who use video every day, in constantly evolving ways, all over the world. This report provides 15 examples that illustrate how individuals, nonprofit organizations, filmmakers, and broadcasters have used advocacy video and television to win direct results in campaigns to promote social awareness, build constituencies, and shape legislation.

Many nonprofit organizations and foundations have overlooked (or actively avoided) producing video and television, fearing the cost and the technology, or doubting the utilitarian value of the medium. The following case studies document specific and unquestionable benefits reaped by nonprofit organizations using video and television.

The lessons of veterans in the advocacy video field will provide a map for producers and organizations at the beginning of their journey into the world of video and television. And as new interactive technologies emerge for distributing video and television programming, it is essential that advocates reflect on the successes of the past as they create strategies for using the technologies of the future.

Picture a room filled with 20 people concerned about a hazardous waste incinerator proposed for their community. These people do not know much about hazardous waste incinerators except that they sound frightening. The person who convened the meeting, a school teacher, introduces herself, dims the lights, and starts playing a videotape.

In this tape, people living in communities with hazardous waste incinerators describe their experiences. They breathe chemical fumes, their children have become ill, and they've heard explosions at night. The incinerator companies promised jobs and prosperity to these predominantly poor and rural communities—most often communities of color. But along with a handful of new jobs, the plants have brought pollution and sickness. The interviewees explain that they could not even move if they wanted to, since no one wants to buy homes beside a plant burning toxic waste.

The video ends. The audience realizes that they are not the first community to find themselves in this situation. They are wondering, since they are a poor, rural, predominantly African-American community, if they are being unfairly targeted to house a hazardous waste facility. The woman who convened the meeting hands out information about incineration and says she has extra copies of the videotape. People begin showing the tape to their family and friends. They bring copies to church meetings and civic organizations. They organize a public screening at the local high school.

The community creates a local environmental group and membership steadily increases. People meet with their local officials and express their concerns. They attend public hearings. They hold demonstrations. Six months later, the incinerator company withdraws the proposal.

A few months after that the incinerator company approaches another small, rural town nearby. A man there has a cousin who once showed him a videotape about incineration. And the battle begins again.

This scenario has been played out in hundreds of communities around the country and around the world. In 1989 Greenpeace hired producer Chris Bedford to create The Rush to Burn, an organizing video about hazardous waste incineration. The 35-minute tape creates a forum in which ordinary people describe their personal experiences. Speaking from almost every region in the country, they tell their stories of life in the shadow of incinerators. Many explain that they had never before participated in local politics, but on this issue they chose to get involved. No organizer could represent the experiences of these people as well as they do themselves.

As proposals for hazardous waste incinerators sprouted up throughout the country, The Rush to Burn spread like wildfire. Between 1989 and 1994 Greenpeace distributed nearly 5,000 copies of the video in the United States, but there were at least 25,000 copies in circulation. People contacted Greenpeace asking permission to duplicate the tape 10, 20, 50 times. They placed copies in local libraries, took them to civic club meetings, and persuaded local cable and PBS stations to air the program.

Grassroots environmental groups contacted Greenpeace saying that The Rush to Burn had enabled them to defeat proposed facilities. Sue Greer, an anti–incinerator activist from Ohio, said, "Because of the video and the fact that we've shown it to hundreds of people, the people proposing the incinerator left town."

"Because video is so palpable and accessible for everyday people," says Lynn Thorpe, director of the Greenpeace USA Toxics Campaign, "it did things for people who needed our help that nothing else could do. They could show it to people over and over again and use different pieces of it. Without The Rush to Burn and the national mobilization it generated, there would be at least 20 more rotary kilns in the United States today burning hazardous waste." By 1993 the national anti–incineration movement had forced the EPA to draft regulations shutting down some of the most dangerous incinerators and promoting waste reduction.

In the past eight years no video produced by Greenpeace matched the impact of The Rush to Burn. Unlike tapes that attempt to generate interest in complex environmental issues in faraway lands, the bulldozers were at the gates of these communities. The Rush to Burn entered and altered existing kitchen–table debates taking place in hundreds of communities. The first–person accounts in the video responded directly to the promises repeated in every pricy public relations campaign waged by the industry. The video articulated another side in the question of incineration, evening the scales in the public debate. Local citizens opposed to the incinerators learned how to use the video to tip the balance in their favor.

The Rush to Burn was only one of many videotapes created by and for the grassroots movement against incineration. Many concerned citizens using their home video cameras or cable access equipment created their own videos about local incineration battles. In their efforts to educate their fellow citizens about this urgent, community–based decision, people turned to video, a social medium, and showed how useful it can be in addressing local political issues.

Breathless, produced by Cathy Scott of Paper Tiger Television, portrays the broad ethnic diversity of New Yorkers opposed to incineration. The tape includes footage from one Williamsburg town meeting attended by 1200 people including African–Americans, Latinos, and Hasidic Jews. As with other anti–incineration tapes, Breathless promotes the idea that diverse people, who may have never come together in a room before, can work together when they share a common goal.

As Carol Roman said, "a video is a tool to unite people." Video can unite people seated around the same VCR, and connect people across city, state, and national boundaries who see their own experiences, beliefs, and fears reflected in the faces on the screen. In those moments of recognition, isolated individuals or communities join a greater political movement. When activists use the power of visual images to explore the most immediate concerns in people's everyday lives—their health, their homes, the safety of their children—the results, cinematically and politically, can be remarkable.

In all the following case studies, a combination of technology and human tenacity created the winning combination. One without the other might not have achieved the desired goal.

Next: Environmental Camcorder Activists