Nonprofit Groups Seek to Connect With Hollywood to Promote Causes

It’s rare for charities to be approached to play a significant role in a movie — as Childreach

was asked to do in About Schmidt, the latest Jack Nicholson feature — but filmmakers and others in the entertainment media are increasingly showing interest in promoting the causes charities and foundations care about.

Before this year’s Sundance Film Festival in January, a group of 230 writers, producers, actors, journalists, and foundation officials met to talk about how to incorporate social messages into movies and other forms of mass entertainment.

Speakers included the actor Pierce Brosnan, who serves on the board of the Environmental Media Association, a Los Angeles nonprofit group that works to get the entertainment industry to include environment-friendly information in story lines.

As a result of the gathering, the first of its kind, a group of participants is considering pooling resources to create a fund to support such entertainment projects.

The point of the meeting was “to create connections and start a network of like-minded stakeholders who are interested in the power of media for social change,” says Carol Atwood, chief executive officer of Spartacus Media Enterprises, in Boston, and one of the organizers of the two-day meeting in Sundance Village, Utah.

“Entertainment is first and foremost entertainment. It has to be financially viable,” she says. “But it can also be a way of educating the public on issues that are of concern to society, like health care, sustainability, social justice, and women’s issues.”

Making a Pitch

Seven nonprofit groups that use film and other media to further their work were invited to the conference to meet the participants and make a pitch for support of their causes. Among the groups at the conference: Witness, a New York charity that provides video cameras to local activists in the United States and 50 countries to expose human-rights abuses, and Working Films, in Wilmington, N.C., a group that uses documentary movies to spur local and national activism around social, economic, environmental, and racial issues.

“It was a good opportunity to network,” says Gillian Caldwell, the executive director of Witness. “I am hopeful that some potential donors may invest in the work we are doing to inject human-rights issues into mainstream media.” Ms. Caldwell had conversations with officials from two foundations that had previously expressed interest in the charity’s programs. The foundations are not based in New York, and the chance meeting at the conference “enabled us to further some dialogues that were just beginning, and a face-to-face contact is the best way to do that,” she says.

Last week, 16 of the Sundance conference participants — including representatives from the Ford, Calvert Social Investment, and Rockefeller Foundations — met in New York to continue the discussion. A follow-up meeting of West Coast conference participants is being planned.