Ann Morse recognized the potential impact of The New Americans immediately upon hearing about the outreach campaign created for the film series. As director of the Immigrant Policy Project at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), she was looking for a way to help lawmakers better understand issues concerning immigrants and refugees. And when state lawmakers previewed a clip from the series at two of the NCSL’s annual meetings, they told Morse that the clip helped them understand the breadth of challenges facing immigrant families.

The New Americans depicts the journey of five families from their homes in the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Mexico and India to new lives in the United States. The series puts a human face on matters of immigration and the reality of the “American dream.” The clip the lawmakers viewed was about the Flores family, from Mexico. The family immigrated to Garden City, Kansas, where patriarch Pedro worked in the city’s meatpacking industry for 13 years.

Through rich storytelling and real characters, the series vividly illustrates what immigrants and refugees must deal with. Morse and the NCSL saw the film not only as a way to educate lawmakers, but also, with its outreach campaign and resources, as a way to forge connections between lawmakers, immigrants and immigrant-serving groups.

The outreach effort around The New Americans series is extremely ambitious. Several organizations have come together to create an integrated campaign designed to reach communities, businesses, policy makers, educators and individuals. Each piece of the puzzle focuses on a different resource type and audience.

“What’s special about this project is that it was in production for so long, which enabled us to incorporate outreach partners early on,” says Gita Saedi, series producer at Kartemquin Films. “The campaign is even more ambitious than we had originally anticipated.”

Four partners created the bulk of the civic engagement resources: the ITVS Community Connections Project (ITVS-CCP), Active Voice, Outreach Extensions and the National Issues Forums Institute. Active Voice cultivated national partners around immigration themes and policy; Outreach Extensions focused on Latino audiences, expanding on the issues revealed through the Flores family’s story and building bridges over time across ongoing, similarly-themed programming; the National Issues Forums Institute used the film as a discussion point in one of their annual issues guides; and ITVS-CCP brought resources into adult education, community college and higher education settings. As the presenter of the series, ITVS also became the key player in efforts to bring the campaign to the public broadcasting system.

“The New Americans outreach effort in many ways represents the best in public broadcasting’s desire to not only reach but engage audiences,” says Maria Alvarez Stroud, executive director of the National Center for Outreach. “By taking the national broadcast and giving it legs through public television outreach, it ensures that the issues raised on air are actively addressed locally.”

Kartemquin Films

Saedi’s passion for the film and the outreach campaign are clear when she describes how the effort evolved over time. The filmmakers have been dedicated to extending the film’s impact from the moment they began floating funding proposals.

“For any issue-based documentary, outreach is always a great part of it,” Saedi says. “The film is the vehicle to get people interested and talking about the issue. If you’ve done a good job with the film and generated that excitement, it’s a pity not to take that further. So outreach was always going to be a part of this film.”

“I feel like it’s so much stronger because we’ve done all the homework and groundwork,” she adds. “None of us wanted our efforts to be formulaic or redundant or without evaluation and follow-up. There’s been a real push to make our outreach work. I think that makes all the difference.”

Active Voice

Ellen Schneider, executive director of Active Voice, says she heard about the series way back in 1995, when it was just a “big idea” at Kartemquin Films.

By the time the series began filming, Active Voice was organizing coalitions of activists, policy makers, educators and businesses around documentary film as a community-building vehicle.

For two and a half years, Active Voice has been building an impressive list of national partners and creating materials around The New Americans for use in those organizations. The group isolated themes within the seven-hour series and produced 30- to 60-minute video modules and associated discussion guides. The broad themes range from supporting families to finding community to building bridges.

The power of the video modules lies in the evocative films from which they are drawn. The films’ characters humanize issues that carry such impersonal labels as “workforce development” and “sensitivity training.”

“When you have the opportunity to leverage this type of content, it’s incredibly motivating,” says Schneider. “There’s tremendous possibility.”

Outreach Extensions

The New Americans series offered an opportunity for Outreach Extensions to reach ethnic communities as well as to build and connect bridges across ongoing public television programming. They used the series to create a workshop—America, My New Home— designed to help outreach staff and Ready To Learn coordinators at public television stations reach Latino parents and other caregivers of Latino children, particularly immigrants.

By using the Flores family—whose story touches on not just the process of immigration but also matters of family, uncertainty and hope—as a springboard, the workshop encourages participants to reflect on their own journeys, with activities like creating journey albums and writing identity poems. The workshop materials include an original storybook, Un nuevo sol/A New Sun, by Max Benavidez and Katherine Del Monte. Monica Medina, project director for Outreach Extensions, says it was challenging to create materials that would be useful to stations conducting Ready To Learn activities and serve at the same time to bridge stations’ efforts in reaching Latino families and organizations, a new endeavor for some of them.

“The compelling story of the Flores family provides an opportunity to connect with Latino families around the theme of immigration and family reunification—a situation others may have experienced,” she says. “The curriculum is also sufficiently open-ended that families of all nationalities will feel welcome and engaged.”

ITVS Community Connections Project

ITVS came onboard with funding and services support in January 2002, recognizing that The New Americans could be a footprint program in their mission of reaching underrepresented communities. Jim Sommers, national outreach manager for ITVS-CCP, says that ITVS assessed the resources already in development and looked for relevant gaps.

“We recognized that there was a lot of interaction between immigrants and other students and faculty within educational settings, especially in adult contexts,” says Sommers. “Immigrants and refugees come to the United States with a variety of skills and often seek professional development to adapt those skills. So we made education a priority in our campaign.”

Andy Nash, a resource developer for the New England Literacy Resource Center, wrote the comprehensive “New Americans Discussion Guide.” She knew the ITVS-CCP guide would be useful in a few arenas: in adult education, especially in ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) and basic education; in efforts to initiate community discussions; and in the professional development of health care workers, law enforcement officers, educators and service workers. She also knew that those using the guide would be both native-born Americans and immigrants.

Since her audience would be diverse, Nash watched the seven-hour series several times, picking out subtle themes and threads and looking for different perspectives. “I needed to watch the film through the lens of who is this audience and what are the issues they’ll be interested in discussing,” says Nash.

For immigrants, she wanted to foster opportunities and venues for sharing experiences and through which they would develop a sense that they’re not alone. For native-born Americans, dispelling myths about why people come here was important as well as comparing rhetoric with reality. “We have a lot of rhetoric about being a welcoming country,” she says. “We need to examine what a welcoming community would really look like, both on a personal and social level.”

ITVS also became the umbrella for getting the message out to the public television community. Making intensive use of the Internet, ITVS will launch a companion website for the series and lesson plans for K–12 educators on PBS.org. ITVS.org features an outreach clearinghouse where stations and community organizations can find information on and links to the materials created by all of the partners.

In addition to employing resources through eight CCP station partners, ITVS-CCP granted awards of $2,500 to $5,000 to 13 public television stations and their community partners to implement their own initiatives. Stations have plans for workshops, classes, town halls, public forums, local programs and instructional booklets targeting educators, service providers, community leaders and the diversity of their local communities.

An interactive map on ITVS.org highlights community and station-sponsored events from all across the country. This innovative Web tool allows people and organizations to browse events related to the series and to add their own, creating a tapestry of social capital in action.

National Issues Forums Institute

When the National Issues Forums Institute was researching the topic of immigration, they approached ITVS to find out about available media. The group focuses on several issues each year, creating discussion booklets for civic and educational organizations interested in addressing public issues in local forums.

The resulting 40-page issues and moderator guide, “The New Challenges of American Immigration: What Should We Do?” highlights The New Americans both as a focus for discussion and in a six-minute videotape. Although the film will air on PBS’s Independent Lens March 29, 30 and 31, 2004, Kartemquin series producer Saedi feels the outreach effort is already touching people and contributing to one of her goals: giving a voice to the voiceless. “It’s so amazing when it’s done and people get it and take from it what we want them to—we’re speechless,” she says. “If we can touch people through more events, then we’ve absolutely reached our goal.”