A TRIBUTE TO JIM YEE

Share your memories of Jim Yee

This past May, ITVS Executive Director James Yee took a medical leave of absence for the second time in as many years, pulling back from day-to-day work responsibilities to fight a recurrence of throat and mouth cancer. This fall, therapeutic options having been exhausted, Jim sent the Board a letter tendering his resignation in the generous way everyone at ITVS has come to know and cherish:

"I want to encourage you to support ITVS's important mission. I hope you will support its staff, who have done such outstanding work and are the real reason ITVS has been able to achieve such success. You've had faith in me to lead ITVS, and I have faith in the staff....I wish each and every one of you well in carrying ITVS's mission forward, and in taking time to value the important things in life."

Heeding this advice,the Board has instituted a search for ITVS's next executive director, and everyone at ITVS has taken time to consider the value and importance - as well as the good luck and sheer fun - of Jim's seven years at the helm of this organization.

At a meeting in September, the staff listed the elements of Jim's leadership we value most. A few highlights include:

• His humility and compassion, and his ability to be a very real person despite his accomplishments.
  
  
• His ability to pull together amazing groups of people, inspiring them to collaborate.
  
  
• His credibility to command people's attention and back up the organization with his own reputation.
  
  
• His willingness to be there with any staff member, talking about any problem or issue.
  
  

Every person of accomplishment receives acknowledgment, but very often, achieving prominence in a competitive field earns tributes balanced with qualms. But when Buzzwords asked people to assess Jim's contributions, what stood out was deep affection and gentle sweetness that transcend professional considerations. A glance at Jim's resume suggests why:

his entire professional life has been driven not by ambition, but by commitments to justice, fairness and equity, especially every community's right to accurate representation in the media.

Jim's background in early childhood education led him to television, which promised more educational impact than working one classroom at a time. His first public television-related job was at WGBH in Boston. In 1977 he joined the production team for Rebop, a multicultural teen series, replacing a producer named David Liu - now executive in charge of program development at ITVS. David has known Jim as long and as well as anyone in the field:

Betty, Jim, Liam and Jane 2000

"I have had the privilege and intense pleasure to have worked with him in a closer way than with anyone. He is a man of keen intelligence. One can always count on Jim to utter words of sharp insight and relevance, often tinged with his dry sense of humor; of great love, in finding Betty, an equal partner, and in being the best father to Jane and Liam; of great passion, to fight the fight, to stay in the frontlines of the battle, to push the limits and challenge adversity for all of us, as when he rallied and activated the creative field to change the tune of Congress from zero-funding of public television to a limited cut that has persuaded the Hill, hopefully, never to raise that cry again."

In the early 1980s, Jim was one of the media activists who started the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), one of the minority consortia funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to support programming on public television that is made by and about people of color. Llew Smith, a long-time independent producer now working for WGBH/Boston, first met Jim when they served on a Media Arts grant panel at the National Endowment for the Arts soon after Jim came to NAATA:

"Jim has a very powerful political side, and he's very charming, so he sort of lures you in, but he whole time, he wheels are turning faster than you can possibly imagine. He's taking things into consideration that you're hardly aware of, and all the time remembering there are a lot of other players who haven't been allowed onto the field."

Lillian Jimenez is a longtime independent media consultant, chair of the steering committee of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, and newly appointed member of the ITVS Board." Jim helped create NAATA, "Lillian told us," and under his stewardship, it became the flagship consortium in terms of living up to its mission."

Jim's achievements at NAATA led directly to his being hired by the ITVS Board in 1993 to lead this organization to what former Board Chair Laura Waterman Wittstock has described as "maturity":

"This was a very challenging task, on the one side educating producers about why their work was having trouble getting on the national PBS schedule, and on the other hand knocking on PBS's door to say "How can we stretch the conversation so more people are included?".

Jim's philosophy is coming down the middle,not a narrow middle,but a bigger, broader one including more vision, more makers. When I was on the Board, we dreamed about what he could have done with $20 million, $50 million, because we understood where he was going." Dee Davis, executive producer of Appalshop Films in Whitesburg, Kentucky, preceded Laura as ITVS Board Chair. He explained:

"Jim came to ITVS at a critical time. The optimism that accompanied the launch of the service was disappearing under the scrutiny that a public institution commands. Our critics were unhappy. Our friends were angry. The first completed pieces were starting to come in, and a lot of them were bad. The Board pretty much turned to Jim and told him to fix it."

It's startling to see how far ITVS has come under Jim's leadership. Jack Willis, the former president/CEO of KTCA (now TPT)in St.Paul, served on ITVS's Board for six years and is now a senior fellow at the Open Society Institute and senior vice president of programming for WorldLink TV. (This joint InterNews/ITVS venture, one of Jim's last ground-breaking projects for ITVS, created a nonprofit DBS television channel dedicated to coverage of the environment, human rights, international security and global culture.) When Jim joined ITVS, public television station leadership was still deeply skeptical about a CPB-funded service to provide independent programming. Says Willis:

Jim Yee with A WOK-IN-PROGRESS producers Arnold Iger and Paul Kwan. Jim Yee and Director of Programming and Development David Liu with Travis Jefferies, subject of the documentary TRAVIS, at the Peabody Awards

"It is now evident that under Jim's leadership,ITVS became the pre-eminent documentary commissioners. ITVS has probably produced more important social issue documentaries than any television organization since WNET in the 1960s. ITVS has brought voices, topics and controversial themes to public broadcasting that would never have happened otherwise. This is part of what the original visionaries were talking about when they drafted the Carnegie Commission report and called for risk-taking, experimentation, the marketplace of ideas."

History is rewritten to reflect the needs of each era. Ours has downplayed the "great man" approach in favor of a more democratic acknowledgment of group efforts and historical forces. As Dee Davis predicts, ITVS will be judged on the programming that so many people have made possible:

"There will be a time when historians and critics look back at this period and reflect on the ITVS experiment: what STRUGGLES IN STEEL meant in the African-American community, what IF I CAN'T DO IT said to viewers about overcoming disability, and what FIRST PERSON PLURAL told audiences about country and family and belonging. My bet is that it will be seen as a significant accomplishment for a community of artists and for a public endeavor. What will be more difficult to measure is that through much of it is Jim's hand. At ITVS, he never held a camera or set a light, but he made the system work. He believed fiercely that independent producers could change television into a force for good, and he defended the enterprise unswervingly."

Gratitude is sometimes diluted with resentment. The people who help us can make us feel less able to help ourselves. But something optimistic and encouraging in Jim Yee's character invites undiluted gratitude, as Lillian Jimenez explains:

"When Jim came to ITVS, it was at a low ebb in terms of its relationship to the independent community, and he really did work to connect with both independents and the public television community. He instilled a greater level of trust in both communities. He has always had dignity and integrity, and that helped to build trust. Jim has been a real constant in this field: he never ever gave up, despite all the obstacles in his way. He overcame them, and I've always been grateful for that."

So have we. If you wish to send a card or note to the Yee family in care of ITVS, we will make sure it reaches them.