Announcement: Social Documentary Workshop in Vietnam

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We would like to invite you to join us on our upcoming Social Documentary Workshop in Thanh Hoa, Vietnam as part of our newest partnership with joinFITE.  The organization has brought us on to produce two short films and still images that profile individual women Heroes to illustrate the ripple effect of providing microloans to women.   This is where you would come in.  Over the course of two weeks, we will teach you how to create media for nonprofits while actually producing joinFITE’s films in the field.

Production Details:

Location: Thanh Hoa, Vietnam

Date: December 1st-15th, 2012

Workshop Participants: 6

Workshop Leader: Phil Borges

Tuition: $2500*

Deadline to Apply: Nov 5th, 2012

In-country Partner:  Fund for Thanh Hoa Poor Women (TCVM)

Description:  Following Kiva’s traditional microloan model, we will produce two short films, each one telling the story of a female microloan recipient in Vietnam.

During the workshop media producers will gain knowledge in all aspects of building a compelling multimedia story in a collaborative environment; including pre-production, storytelling, capturing still and video, post-production and distribution.

We are also finalizing the details for a second workshop also with joinFITE in Africa in early 2013. We will release further information once we know the exact location and dates.

If you are interested in either or both of these opportunities, please complete our online application by Nov 5th.

About joinFITE:

joinFITE is an active philanthropy platform, powered by Kiva.org and championed by Dermalogica, that connects the public to women entrepreneurs who need a hand up. By providing women access to small loans, they are able to start or grow a business, bettering themselves, their families, and their communities.

Kiva.org powers the joinFITE platform, and is a non‐profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world.

*Workshop participants are responsible for travel expenses, lodging and food.

 

Workshop Tip: The Secret to Engagement is Character

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“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
– Mother Teresa

Syreeta Studying at the Library

To gain empathy for a larger issue you must start with an individual personal story.

In our latest multimedia piece, we told Syreeta’s story to introduce you to how Foundation for Women’s microfinance programming is bringing women out of poverty.

A relatable character is key and one of the best methods to engage your audience.  The audience needs to see or imagine themselves in the character or situation.  A character can be human, animal and even an object or a location–anything that has the ability to take action or suffer consequences can be a character. However, since stories are created and consumed by humans, a character is always viewed from a human perspective.

People help us relate and emotionally connect to the story.  Finding strong subjects is one of the most important jobs of the storyteller.  This is why it is crucial to do your research beforehand and hold pre-production interviews. Watch for our next workshop tip where we will share some guidelines to consider when choosing your character.

Interesting in learning more about multimedia production and storytelling? Apply for Stirring the Fire’s Social Documentary Workshops here.

Why Women and Girls? Part Two.

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Moving from the macro topic of gender equality to more of Phil’s individual approach in his work, we offer the rest of the interview. (Questions in italics.)

As a photographer you’ve had to learn the art of approaching individuals not only for a photograph but also for interviews. How do you approach women and girls as subjects, especially they are victims of gender-based violence?

I approach them as I approach anybody: out of curiosity and respect. I’m approaching them mostly to tell a story. Just like you right now, you’re approaching me and you have an agenda to tell a story. That’s the way I approach the women that I bring into my photographs and films.

Phil Photographing an Acid Burn Survivor in Cambodia (Filming for UN Women, Photo Danielle Prince)

Have you had to navigate that potentially awkward space of being a man and approaching a woman? How do you do that?

I don’t think of it that way. I’m reminded of it at times, especially in places like Afghanistan. I’m very touchy. “Hi, how are you doing?” [Mimics clapping someone on the shoulder.] I was reminded there: you do not do that. I don’t really differentiate in my mind between women and men in terms of the work I do. I’m just not thinking ‘I’m a man, she’s a woman’. I do hear about it though. I get surprised at times when I hear that there was grumbling in CARE because I’m was a man out there doing this and why didn’t they have a woman doing it?

So coming from a macro-picture in talking about gender equality, what motivates you to tell individual women’s stories?

It is the most effective way for an audience to access a situation or an issue. It is just the way the human mind is built. We can’t really wrap our heads around 200 million deaths; we can wrap our heads around somebody we know who dies, or is starving, or is oppressed. Nicholas Kristof talks about this. He was doing a story on the issue of female infanticide in Asia because of dowry. There are millions of missing girls in the world because of this [type of] gender discrimination. But it was a non-issue. But then you have the death of Princess Diana and the whole world is weeping. At the same time how many people are dying in wars and [because of] violence against women? It’s just the way we are built: individual stories move us.

Having heard hundreds if not thousands of stories, is there any one that sticks out, or that touched you most deeply?

I’m moved by stories that have to do with the ‘wounded healer’; the person who has been a victim of the issue and who springs back from the tragedy and uses it to propel them to address it for others. One of my favorite stories is the one of Abay, the woman in Ethiopia. It is the hero’s journey that Joseph Campbell talks about. They go out into the unknown world and come back with information for the tribe. That type of story is always amazing to me. They are powerful stories when they use tragedy to better humankind.

Abay’s story:

I’m getting to the stage where people come up to me and say ‘hey, you inspired me to do this’. It is people I don’t even know. It is very rewarding when you hear that. I say, ‘what did I do, quit orthodontics? (laughs). Or ‘the story on what you’re doing for women, or what you’re did for Tibet, or the way you’re going about it’.

You’re causing a ripple effect.

Yeah. It has nothing to do with the story that I’m doing. They are doing something else completely but they’re doing something that has a lot of meaning to them, and it is usually something socially and environmentally good for the world.

How Will her World be Different from her Grandmother’s? (Photo Danielle Prince)

Do you have any concluding thoughts for readers?

Here I am almost 70 years old and I can look back in my lifetime see such a huge improvement in the way women are treated. There is a long way to go, but in terms of giving women equal opportunity in doing what they want to do, different opportunities to do what they want to do, we’ve achieved much. The most dramatic example for me was in my dental school where there wasn’t a woman in my class, not one. In the whole UC San Francisco Dental School there was one woman and it was the daughter of a visiting professor. I went back to give a commencement address at this same school and 54% of the student body were women. In 30 years it had changed that much. Everybody thinks the world is getting worse, that there are all these horrible problems and yeah, we’ve always had problems. Just pick up an old paper on WWII and read the headlines: 200,000 people killed in a day in 1 battle. I don’t know how many people died in Iraq, but on our side it was less than 10,000. In WWII that would be a couple of hours in battle.

Everything is getting better. The thing that makes everything seem like it’s getting worse is media. (laughs) The media has to find news and it’s everywhere. It’s big business and unfortunately people crave bad news. But I personally think things are getting a lot better.

Why Women and Girls? Part One.

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As a Stirring the Fire volunteer over the last year and a half, I’ve enjoyed several conversations with STF Founder Phil Borges about his work. However, more people than myself need to hear the inspirational and visionary aspects he brings to his work, so we decided to have actual interviews on several topics with him. In today’s post he shares his thoughts on why he has decided to focus on women and girls. (Questions in italics.)

Young Cambodian Girl with a Younger Child on Her Back (Photo Danielle Prince)

In all of your international travels, your breadth of experience in documenting people’s stories, why focus on women and girls? Why is this important to you?

I started to notice how hard women and young girls work, and how much work they do. I travel mostly in the developing world and there you have to collect water and firewood and do all the cooking on open fires. In terms of child care, young girls are saddled with that at a very, very young age. I’ve seen girls who’ve just started to walk with a baby on their back. This is where it first started – just noticing this situation.

I met people from CARE who I ended up working with. These individuals started telling me things about not only what women and girls face in terms of work they do, but about a lot of the cultural traditions that discriminate against women and girls, or that harm women and girls like female genital cutting. The big thing for me was, at this point in my career, I was doing a lot of human rights work. I had started on the Tibetan project and from there I started doing things with Amnesty International. But all these stories, at the time I was telling them, were around “exogenous” issues. In other words they were issues that were being forced upon people from the outside: China taking over Tibet, the oil companies coming in and spoiling the Amazon and the tribal people paying the consequences. But the thing with women is it’s endogenous. It is embedded within the culture.

I really hesitated about getting involved with the issue. I didn’t get really involved until years after I had noticed all these things and learned that the discrimination and inequality was there. But I also learned how effective it was in changing gender inequality in terms of reducing poverty, bringing stability and peace to a country, helping with environmental sustainability. All these things improved when the lives of women and girls are enhanced with education, access to resources, healthcare.

What made you hesitate before taking on this vast subject of gender inequality?

Cultural imperialism. Who are we to say what another culture should do in terms of the way they assign roles to women and men?

So you didn’t want to become an “imperialist”.

That’s the big thing; it’s easy to slip into that [role]. I’m going over to Dolpa [Nepal] in a couple of days and there they have their shamans, their traditional healers, and we’re coming in and saying ‘we know how better to serve your health needs; we’re the great white fathers’. So it’s always something you have to be on guard for. We think we always have all the answers.

Phil Photographing Adorable Girls in Cambodia (Filming for UN Women, Photo Danielle Prince)

But there are so many issues around the world that you could focus on. What is personally important to you about gender equality?

I think it’s the most effective way to address the major ills that face humanity: poverty, war, environmental degradation. I think you get the most bang for your buck. It is the moral thing to do but more than that it’s the most practical thing to do. If you get down deeper into my psyche I’ve been raised by women and surrounded by women my whole life; women have cared for me and taken care of me. Single mom, sisters, wives, I’m a kept man by women (laughs). In my [orthodontic] practice I had all women, 14 assistants, except for one man. But I don’t know how much that plays into it. It could, it’s there. But it is a very practical thing when I think about it logically.

What do you have to say to people who take issue with the fact that you are a man, even as a strong ally for the women’s movement globally, doing this work?

You’ve got to bring the men into the movement to make it successful. I have women come up to me and say ‘I saw your book Women Empowered, saw it was written by a man and I just put it back down and didn’t even open it’. I’ve had them come up to me after one of my talks and apologize for what they said earlier. So I thought ‘wow, I wonder how many people do think that?’. I think, quite frankly, that the women’s movement has grown, and is maturing. It started as an anger-based movement. Women were pissed. I think [the anger] is something that any movement has to get passed eventually to make it a real strong, mature and holistic movement.

Phil and Cambodian Girl Taking a Break (Filming for UN Women, Cambodia, Photo Danielle Prince)

Why should people care about gender equality?

Because it is like civil rights. Why do we care about civil rights? Why do we want to treat each other like we like to be treated? Again, it is moral, but it is very, very practical in terms of addressing the issues that are very on our radar right now: peace, stability. Even in Liberia, you go to a place like that and you say ‘Charles Taylor came in and tore the place apart over 15 years’. The women came in, got together, and as a movement put an end to it. They have the first woman in Africa elected and who is bringing this country back from hell, really. The whole microcredit movement has been powered by women. Women, when they get money, they put it into the healthcare and the education of their kids. That’s why giving resources to women builds the infrastructure of a community so fast.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this interview with Phil Borges in which he talks more about his personal approach and experiences.

“I Have Big Dreams”

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The following is a guest post from our Social Documentary Training participants Michele Zousmer, Michael J. Costa and Sara Begley.

“Oh the stories I could tell you about Syreeta,“ Antoinette jokingly mused about her daughter. “From inviting every neighbor child in for dinner to the year she gave away the Thanksgiving turkey straight out of the oven to a homeless man, that girl has always been sharing.”

Syreeta at a Foundation for Women Meeting

You never quite know what you will find when you take on a project. The three of us, photographers Michael J. Costa and Michelle Zousmer as well as audio/interview specialist Sara Begley, became a team soon after beginning our ten-day workshop with Stirring the Fire. We were told the young woman from the San Diego suburb of El Cajon was beautiful and unique but we weren’t expecting to find the diamond in the rough that was Syreeta. When approached, she felt inspired to tell her own story of struggle in order to inspire women of all ages to find the resources for their own empowerment and success. There seemed no end to those struggles—abuse, illness, death, homelessness and unemployment to name a few. It made the way Syreeta eyes light up when she spoke of her “Big Dreams” all the more magical. With the support of her husband she became a licensed aesthetician and is determined to make a difference in the world of skin care.

Syreeta working with a client

“I guess it just makes sense to me,” Syreeta recalled. “I am still that little girl who wants to share even with my interest in skin care today. I never understood those in my industry who keep their talents and skills to themselves. How will any of us ever learn? How can we ever improve and grow?”

It is this concept of “sharing” that brought us all together for ten days in San Diego. As photographers and interviewers, we felt the desire to use our skills to make a difference and were led to Stirring the Fire. Phil Borges, an accomplished photographer and filmmaker began the company believing he could bring specialists in multi-media together with organizations committed to social change. That belief forged a partnership with Foundation for Women who are applying the Nobel Peace Prize award-winning Grameen microcredit model to help local women facing poverty.

Syreeta is committed to making a difference. She hopes to take advantage of the Foundation’s education and mentoring programs so that one day she can start her own business in skin care. But her big dreams don’t stop there. She hopes to give back to the community she loves by providing jobs and training for the next generation. Sharing, sharing and more sharing. We walked away from our experience inspired by what can be accomplished when we as individuals move past our insecurities and struggles and open up, looking to give back. Syreeta, Stirring the Fire and the Foundation for Women are determined to change the world.

One Notification at a Time

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by Alissa Brooks

Assemble a team.  Gather media.  Edit media.  Distribute media. Change the world.

Sounds simple enough. Right?

Through this social documentary workshop all of us have learned that there is nothing simple about media production.  Today, after a presentation about distribution of media, we learned that even when the media is created the process is not over.  How do you reach an audience?  What is the best platform (or platforms) for engaging people?

The answer: hybrid distribution. Hybrid distribution combines both traditional marketing efforts (emailing, luncheons, brochures) and new media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)  New media, also referred to as social media, is a platform for media that is exponentially growing.  The best way to tap in to social media audiences is to just dive in – make an account, network, and see the response.  Each social media platform has its own unique audience base.

Photo of the author.

As the social media expert of this workshop, I primarily focused on Facebook, Twitter, and blogging.  I, Alissa Brooks, have been behind many of the Facebook posts and Tweets, along with guest blogging for Stirring the Fire.  I am a recent graduate of Walsh University in North Canton, Ohio, earning degrees in English and Theology.  I begin graduate school next month at Brandeis University in Boston, Massachusetts, to study Non-Profit Management.

Social media is so much a part of my life – I’ve grown up with it.  Yet, understanding how to use social media for a non-profit business is different than logging into your personal Facebook page and posting about your day.  Effective social media involves using key words, strong visuals, timing, and engaged followers.  In all honesty, a business’s use of social media is dictated more by its followers than its staff.  What do you find interesting?  What are you interested in?  What inspires you to act?  That’s always been the point of social media – it’s for individuals to be themselves.

Thank you for your support of Stirring the Fire during our first workshop.  Thank you for taking time to read our posts and engage with our social media.  Keep spreading the word.  Keep reading and commenting.  Together, we can change the world.  One notification at a time.

Connecting the Dots

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by Alissa Brooks

Nancy Farese, founder of Photo Philanthropy, in Vista, California capturing stills for the Stirring the Fire social documentary workshop.

Nancy Farese, founder of Photo Philanthropy and workshop participant, explains to me,  “One of the biggest challenges that we see is non-profits not understanding how to use digital media for cause advocacy.  Phil is a master of that.  He not only knows how to access effective media, but how to distribute it and use it for effective messaging.”

Photo Philanthropy is a San Francisco based non-profit organization that connects photographers with non-profit organizations to enable social change.  Nancy goes to say that at Photo Philanthropy “we often talk about harnessing the power of the still image and applying that power to social media and other digital platforms.”  This discussion is part of the brainchild behind this social documentary workshop.

Phil’s workshop is all about broadening the knowledge of media producers – photographers, filmmakers, graphic artists, journalists alike – to create a wider variety of advocacy media for social causes. One of the many things we have learned is that  understanding how and which digital platform to use is critical.  After all, you may create a beautifully inspiring film, but without a directed distribution plan, it may never reach your desired audience and therefore not have the desired impact.

As we have all realized this week, the media production process can feel quite sporadic.  Indeed, the only linear part of film making is the audio script that is laid down before visuals are added.  The constant communication between media producers and the non profit that will distribute the finished product is part of Stirring the Fire’s (STF) methods.  STF defines upfront what it hopes to accomplish based on the non profit’s need and desired audience.  This method works perfectly with the social documentary workshop model because of the diversity of backgrounds and skill sets that each participant provides.

“Phil is at the nexus of pulling media together and working closely with the non profit and defining upfront the impact and then backing into the production,” explains Nancy.  This is all done to create organization-specific media that will transcending the choir.  To do this, the media platform is key.  To appeal to a broader audience, it is important to connect the dots between powerful images and the power of social media.

Begin to Understand

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by Alissa Brooks

Post-production is in full swing here at the Foundation for Women offices in San Diego.  For the past ten hours our workshop participants have made storyboards, transcribed, selected quotes, edited audio … and the end is nowhere in sight.

“Film is a team effort, but when you’re a photographer it’s a solo effort,” explains Michele Zousmer, one member of Stirring the Fire’s social documentary workshop.  Teamwork is essential to pull all the pieces of media together to make a coherent, consistent, and concise documentary.

Michele resides in San Diego but has traveled around the world with her camera, including to China, Ethiopia, and Rwanda.  In the past week, she has traveled all around San Diego with her team documenting a Foundation for Women hero who is not only an entrepreneur, but a wife, mother, and singer.

Michele says, “Being a humanitarian photographer, I tell a story through visual imagery, which is a powerful tool to tell a story. Video makes even more of an impact.”  Before that impact can be felt, all the photos, audio, and video must be whittled down.  The editing process is just that, a process.  Yet, once every clip is set in place and every image perfectly selected, the magic of the story takes over.  All this work is worth it when another people can see our work and connect with another human being – someone they have never met before – and, even just for a few minutes, begin to understand.

Michele Zousmer, humanitarian photographer who plans to continue to learn about film making.

 

Tell Me a Story

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by Alissa Brooks

We’re starting to lose track of the number of days we’ve been here in San Diego, but today does mark our last day of filming, photographing, and audio collecting on location with Foundation for Women’s heroes.  The production phase has come to an end, and now the editing begins.

Phil says that audio is the backbone of any documentary.  Without good audio you’re sunk. Capturing sound bites is quite the process, as we have all learned first hand.  First comes microphone set up, then sound levels are tested and monitored, the interview is conducted … and then the “fun” begins.  Each interview must be transcribed, word for word, by someone so that it can be easily edited and the audio can be added to the film.  To easily pick out quotes in an interview is key to telling the person’s story.

Sara Begley transcribing an interview

“We are all walking around telling a personal narrative to ourselves,” explains Sara Begley, a workshop participant, “and they absolutely define who we are.  I think everybody wants to be heard and understood.”

Sara is the storytelling expert of the group.  A San Diego resident, Sara has made a business of capturing family histories through interviews, transcription, and printing.  While she has put her transcribing skills to good use here at the workshop, her ability to tell a compelling story has truly been her gift to this process.

“In this  documentary film making process, the story is organic – it’s them, it’s the person, it’s their life – it’s so easy to capture that, just get someone to start talking.”  The difference with this workshop is that the visual component is added to story. “Phil and his art take storytelling up a level.  Learning from him has been inspiring. I need stories, I crave them.  I’ve always been that way.  They carry me. And now I know that what I want to do for a living is possible.”

Got Inspiration?

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“I am inspired by my mom.”  This is not the common thing we hear from twelve-year-olds when asked about his or her parents, but Diana is different.  Her mother, Nancy, is the recipient of a micro-credit loan from Foundation for Women.  For the past two days, half of our workshop team has been on location filming, photographing, and interviewing Nancy’s family.

The inspiration in this family does not stop with the twelve-year-old.  Nancy herself constantly tells us how much influence her own mother had in her life, “She would work an eight hour day and then come home, grab her merchandise, and go door to door selling wares to support myself and my brothers.  She was such a hard worker.”  Nancy has carried on the tradition of hard work, now teaching it to her children as she starts up her own cake-baking business.

Michael J. Costa, photographer and workshop participant

Inspiration is needed for small business work, families, and artists alike.  One of our workshop participants, Michael J. Costa, has been inspired for years by the work of Phil Borges, the workshop leader and founder of Stirring the Fire.  “I got into photography later in life, just like Phil, and I was always fascinated by his Dalai Lama photograph.”  It was while Michael was in school at the Academy of Arts in San Francisco that he got to interview Phil, his favorite photographer, for a research paper.  “I think Phil speaks for a generation of photographers.  He does what I want to do; he travels and captures people’s eyes and emotions in his photographs.  The social documentary part of his work really intrigues me.”

Phil Borges’ photograph of the Dalai Lama, 1994.

Here at the workshop Michael is a self-proclaimed sponge.  “I am soaking up all the information about pre-production, on location shooting, and post-production.  I feel so blessed to be here learning from my mentor, sometimes, it’s even overwhelming.  Yet, Phil makes us all feel like we are deserving, that we can move on, be professionals, and reach our goals.”

As each workshop participant works towards his or her personal goals, together we are all back in the office, downloading the day’s photographs and video clips.  This process of downloading helps each photographer review their work, edit, and find those images that truly inspire.