|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
SWEET OLD SONG Outreach Campaign By filmmaker Leah Mahan
A Difficult Film for Outreach? Howard and Barbara's story had a profound impact on me and I knew it would affect other people - but unlike in my previous documentary work, it wasn't immediately obvious what networks I could mine to find my audience. The documentary touches on broad human themes, and people react to it on an emotional level. From showing the film to people and evaluating their feedback, I'd found that audiences could feel:
The element of the story that drew me in was the one I thought provided the best focus for an outreach campaign: creative expression, and its power to open doors of opportunity, particularly in the lives of children and elders. I envisioned an outreach strategy that would make Howard and Barbara's stories accessible to elders and young people in disadvantaged communities, through senior centers and community art centers. My main outreach challenge was that I had a limited budget. My previous documentary, Holding Ground: The Rebirth of Dudley Street, was blessed with a hefty outreach budget that allowed us to work fully staffed for a year in advance of the broadcast. Based on that experience, I wrote an ambitious outreach proposal, but managed to secure only a fraction of the budget. I received two grants, from the National Black Programming Consortium and the LEF foundation. The majority of the funding arrived only two months before the broadcast on P.O.V.. I attribute the lack of funding partly to time constraints and also to the more humanistic (and therefore less fund-able) outreach themes in SWEET OLD SONG. The Core Campaign
Because I had limited "people-power" to organize events, I decided to make free copies of SWEET OLD SONG available to nonprofit arts and elder organizations serving disadvantaged communities. This was a way to get the video out to groups that might not otherwise have had access to it, and it also meant that I could hand much of the organizing over to these groups. I asked them to submit an application (available online) outlining their ideas for using the video in their work, and to commit to returning an evaluation. I did not anticipate how labor intensive it would be to solicit and process the applications, although I found that the written statements about goals and outcomes were truly valuable. I received requests from some of the places I expected, such as African American art and cultural organizations, gerontology programs and art programs at nursing homes. But other requests gave me new insight about who might find the video useful: from educators in sex education and mental health counseling, hospital staff running training programs in diversity and end-of-life issues, a counselor for teens recovering from addiction and an instructor teaching English to Spanish-speaking seniors. I would certainly give tapes away again in the future, but I would be more realistic about the time and money required to find the right networks, notify them about the availability of the tapes and respond to their requests.
The two places where I took the lead in organizing outreach events were Massachusetts and Tennessee, where most of the documentary was shot. Howard and Barbara live in Boston, and the second half of the documentary follows them back to Howard's hometown near Knoxville, Tennessee. Early on I showed excerpts of SWEET OLD SONG at a Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC) event, the Elder Arts Symposium, where I got feedback from elder service providers about how the video related to their work. Later, the MCC provided a mailing list of organizations that they recommended I contact about the availability of the free videos. The Tennessee Arts Commission provided a similar list and provided funding to the Knoxville Museum of Art so that they could make their screening of SWEET OLD SONG free to the public. They also published an article about the documentary and the local outreach activities in their statewide newsletter.
The highlights of the campaign for us were the public events that Howard and Barbara participated in, in Chicago, Boston, Nashville and Knoxville. In Chicago, SWEET OLD SONG was included in the Silver Images Festival, which features films about older people. Howard and Barbara attended screenings of the film at the DuSable art museum and it was later shown at Chicago senior centers. In Boston, where I had worked for many years, Barbara and I tapped into our networks in the arts community to fill a screening and concert at the Museum of Fine Arts and a community center in Dorchester. In Knoxville, we hosted a successful screening and concert at the museum and another screening and discussion at the East Tennessee Historical Center. In Nashville, we worked with the ITVS field organizer, who organized an event at the Country Music Hall of Fame with the participation of cultural and educational institutions. Thanks in part to the enthusiastic participation of an African American arts organization, Creative Artists of Tennessee, a diverse audience filled the theater and made this the Hall of Fame's most successful public program to date. Months later, in February, Howard was awarded a Tennessee's Governor's Award in the Arts, and his nomination was fueled in part by the Hall of Fame event. But overall I find it hard to evaluate the impact of all this activity. In the end I remember the words and voices of those who were affected by the documentary. The one who stands out in my mind is an older African American woman in Knoxville who told us after a screening that her guitar had been under her bed for decades, and that she was going to rush home and start playing. |
     |
|
 |
|
