 Hey, Neil, come on up and join me. Hi, everyone. Thanks for sitting through with us with technical difficulties and all the rest. I guess part of doing community-driven work is rolling with the punches. My name is Lauren Ellen McCann. Two of those are my first name. And with me here is Neil Baer. Neil, you may recognize if you're very good at matching credits to faces as a well-renowned television writer and producer. He's been associated with such tiny projects as ER, Law and Order, SBU, Under the Dome, and he's one of the co-producers of If You Build It. So we don't have a ton of time, but I wanted to do a little bit of scene setting and then ask you a few questions if you're ready to roll. We'll also pitch this out to all of you who I can half see here in the mist. But to give just a little bit of preface, I'm a design justice worker. I'm someone who uses community-led processes as part of my work. So it's a complicated phrasing, but I want to start here because what we just saw in If You Build It is one method of community design. There's a myriad of them. And the thing about when we try to use language to encapsulate actual processes, not just nice, simple, easy jargon phrases, it's easy to lose the details, the principles, the methodologies. That's why when Catherine was up here earlier, contextualizing the work that Brazilian communities is doing in New America NYC, based here, right here in your city, she started with principles. Because it's from principles that we're able to direct the actions that we create. When you're looking at the landscape of community leadership in design, and as I think was outlined in a good detail here during the film, there's many different points in the process when you can include people in the actual creation of anything, whether it's a farmer's market, a piece of technology, a governance system, there's a wide variety of things. But there's also a variety of different points that people can be part of the process. And there's also a big difference between injecting people into a process and actually allowing for their vision and their creative confidence to develop. So I think I just wanted to contextualize that we saw here tonight was one method of many. What Brazilian communities is doing here in New York City is a very different method. What I do in Washington DC is also different. But this is also teaming me up to ask Neil. I'm so curious how you came into contact with this whole field of design, and in particular, as I understand it, Emily's work. Well, thank you all for coming, and thank you to Shelly and Larry who we thanked at the end of the film who funded their sitting back there, who funded this film and made it possible. So thank you, both Shelly and Larry. Because when you make documentaries, when you make documentaries, you're scraping just as you're making buildings like the kids and Emily and Matt did, it's, you know, piece by piece, brick by brick. So we're very grateful to them. I read a book from the TED Talks called Design Revolution on how to products that can change the world by Emily Piloton. And I read it all in one sitting, and I just was so inspired because there was a plethora of different projects that made a difference around the world using kind of very basic materials. For instance, like cutting tires in half and building playgrounds in Africa. Actually, Emily had done that, and using these structures to teach mathematics. So I was really struck and loved it, and I loved the design thinking element of it. And so I went to IDEO, which is an organization that designs products like the mouse, the swiffer, needless vaccines, and was really taken with the work they were doing, and they had worked with Emily as well, and she had worked with them. And they're based in California, Northern California, but they're also here. And the IDEO.org does the nonprofit side of design to address problems around the world. So I was very interested in that. And as a physician, as well as a writer and producer. And so I contacted Emily actually through Facebook. I Facebook friended her, and then I sent her a message and said, I have to meet you. And she lived in San Francisco then, and so we got together, and I flew up there from LA where I live. And she told me that she was about to embark on this crazy project of going to the poorest county in North Carolina, Bertie County, to work with her boyfriend, Matt, to teach design to these kids that Chip Zollinger had found them and heard about the work. And then, of course, as you saw in the film, Chip was fired soon after they got there. And that's the struggle of making a documentary. We thought, well, there's no documentary now because Chip was fired about a month into making the film, but then Matt and Emily decided to stay and then the film came into being. So it was just sort of my, through my intention to get to know Emily and social media made it happen that I was able to do it. And I just, when I met her, and as you can tell as a filmmaker, you can tell when people, both when I work with actors and when I do documentaries, that some people just have these personalities and some of the kids do, of course, as well, and we feature them, that they're very cinematic. And Emily is certainly really cinematic and emotional and thoughtful. And I just knew meeting her that she would make a great subject. And though you're just, you also go there with hopes that it'll work because you just never know for sure. So that's how it all got started. And then the first place we went to was the, I went to the MacArthur Foundation and got my first grant and then it built over time from Sundance. And we had so many funders by the end because it takes a lot of funders, as I said. Speaking of time, actually, one of the things I was very struck by in this film is the important insistence on the fact that the project isn't actually the farmers market. It's investing in the capabilities, the creativity, the confidence, the different skill-building of these individuals, these individual students, these individual people and all the people they come into contact with. And in order to do that, whether or not, I know the question of the salary was a big issue in this film, but whether or not there's salary, the ability to fund organizers, essentially. People who are often, and I think the preferred methodology is actually to fund people who are already in the community to invest in that work. But I appreciated that the film didn't back away from that point because what I see a lot in the innovation landscape in 2016 is a lot of people wanting things very quickly. They short-changed a lot of that relationship development and I really appreciated that that was very present here. But this teased me up to ask, this film was made in 2013. What's happened in the last three years? Lots. So Matt and Emily are no longer together and you can sort of see that the relationship is sort of starting to fray and it really took a toll on them and they were lovely to work with and we're still friends with both of them and Emily is still in Berkeley, just doing incredible work. She's at the magnet school, she's really focusing on girls and teaching girls like nine to 14 design and shop and building and they've built all kinds of structures in Berkeley and Matt was in Colorado and now he's teaching in Idaho and doing the same thing. So they are both committed to doing that. The kids, three of them went to college. None of them, as I recall, had families who went to college. So Koran is just finishing his engineering degree and he thanks Emily and Matt and Eric has finished his degree and the one who's most surprising is Stevie who went to college and is not a farmer. He wants to be an actor. But what have we done to pour Stevie? Stevie has been out to LA. No, but Stevie still works on his farm but Stevie has ambitions way beyond and so he also thanks, they all are indebted to Emily and Matt and you can see how school and teachers can make a difference. Jamisha went into the military, Cameron is an EMT. So they all say and it was just an experience that really changed their lives and they're in touch with the kids still and we're in touch. Christine, my partner on at O'Malley, my producing partners in touch with the kids all the time and when we have screenings in North Carolina or places where the kids always show up and their parents, it really had a profound impact. The school board was fired. But there was some issues with the school board and I like to think that and I know that the film had some impact. And where as we show where money goes and the guy Ron Wesson became an elected official and is still an elected official. So he's the one who said that there was only one grocery store and I think the other thing I wanna say is that what I love about the film is using this design thinking approach that Emily goes through where you start with research, ideation, design, prototype, redesigning it and building it. And so that works as Emily and Matt say in all realms of life really and you saw that the kids were taking online PE and that was really horrifying to us and that was going on and online everything, half the day, half the day spent with Matt and Emily, half the day, all of them stuck in that room. And what's really interesting to me is that that hasn't changed so much there because Emily and Matt were fired because they had built this, you can imagine the politics but it really did change the kids' lives and it's, to me, when Matt talks about Detroit and that it was top down and he devoted himself to building this house and giving it to a family but the family was not engaged at all in the making of that house, it wasn't their story as Matt says and to me this is my favorite part of the film but this is their story and this was Stevie, really Stevie who designed Stevie and CJ but Stevie designed the farmer's market that they actually chose so it came out of their story one of unemployment, lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables and obesity and so I think that that has huge implications for schools and the way we deal with social policies and if you're interested there's a wonderful book called Change by Design by Tim Brown who is very influential on Emily's work and he's the head of IDEO and it looks at how to take a design thinking approach rather than this, we know what's best for your approach. Well and you actually brought up something that I found really challenging about the film so coming not necessarily from design thinking but akin field design justice which actually predates design thinking and many of the people who developed design thinking were either influenced by it or sometimes just not even aware that this tradition had existed. Depending on how you trace it, there's methodologies that started in the 1960s of this very similar format also called co-design and a big tenet of design justice is looking at the entire context of creation and I think the Detroit scene that you brought up I found really difficult because it didn't address any of the structural racism or classism involved in that kind of house desecration and I know when you're working with a film you have limited narratives available to you but I did watch the engagement with the school board and some of the lack of transparency there and seeing that thinking filtering in but I was just wondering since you lifted up the scene in particular how that registers for you. In terms of how we presented it or because I'm really interested in the notion of and there's such huge debate about aid, particularly foreign aid and this notion of top down versus bottom up and so I think the point that Matt was making was that there needs to be engagement that when it's very sort of almost patronizing or we're telling you what's best for you and we're going to give you something and you should appreciate it. You know I don't know actually we I don't know what happened to the house and I don't think that people were coming into the house and just tearing out things to use but I think the point we were trying to make was that when you don't engage people at the beginning and they're telling them what's best for them and this can be, there's a really wonderful book by Molly Melching and she has an organization called Tostan, T-O-S-T-A-N and I've been very influenced by them too which she calls herself a social norm entrepreneur where she gathers women in Senegal to talk about female genital cutting and instead of saying this is bad or you shouldn't do it she just works as a moderator to let people tell their stories and decide what works for them and this has had a huge impact across Senegal, Ethiopia and Somalia. The point being is that people find their way through their own stories and not being told what to do. Yes they need aid, they need support but if you're going to do it in a way that is we know best which we tend to do with aid so that it's often that this is problematic and so it's at least a way of kind of bringing together not always harmoniously people to struggle with their own problems and as Matt said that this was the kid's story, this was the story or Emily says it at the end too if it had been in a city, maybe an urban area but they wouldn't have done a farmer's market they would have whatever the story was and I think that that's an approach but certainly what you say in terms of building for justice is one has to recognize all of the barriers be it immigration issues or race, class, LGBT all the things that we think about or I think about in the work I do as a physician in designing projects for global health I think apply to what you're saying and I think has to be stated outwardly when you're taking on these projects. Absolutely and I really appreciate the way in which you were framing agency as part of this and these different design methods that attempt to allow communities to harness their own self-determination and based on the varieties of different contexts and the complexity of power that are present in these spaces. And it's messy, it's much easier to say hey I know what's best for you and don't do this and just you do that and we're gonna give you this. And then it's not, there's no ownership so we are doing actually, knock on wood, we have a TV series based on the film and we're doing it, we're hoping to do it soon and it's just on a larger scale we go into a city and the city, you know the neighborhood associations the people who are leaders the you know when they're bringing people together you know to talk about the problems will decide what they need based on their story and then we will bring in designers, architects and social entrepreneurs and they'll fight it out because you know it'll be like you know as you saw in the film it's not just one way to do something and that's, but I think it has more power to succeed if people are invested and there's been a lot of academic work in these areas certainly about aid as well. I think there's also been a lot in the world of teaching I mean the world of public theory and popular education is very much steeped in this and also one of the things I saw echoed in the design thinking approach from popular education is the use of arts and different communication styles as part of that and it's also a big motivator one of my favorite examples of community leadership and design is the work of the Prometheus radio project which Prometheus would be called by a community that wanted to establish their own communications network to work with different community members there to get a radio tower up and running in the course of a three day period including a full programming lineup and support to keep the programs on the air for months and years afterward and they have a number of different success stories and different communities there but I don't see a lot of mainstream attention to these very process informed projects. Well you know I think that's what's really interesting an interesting kind of movement across the United States and you'll see it sort of popping up now more and more which is on a national level things are pretty crazy and screwed up. You have to go into communities and when you go into communities you see all kinds of amazing things like in I think it was I just read and I wanna say it was in Chattanooga but it was in Tennessee where they had some problems with roads and driving and people getting to places and so the city itself took upon itself to do the surveys and leaders and citizens and they got together and they established bike lanes and new parks and kind of rethought the way people drove through the city and changed the city in a profound way and so I think we're seeing across the US really important things happening at the town level and the city level but when we start to get to the state and national level things seem to be not seems things are in terrible disarray and I don't know what the solution to that is but I do think that there is hope that people at the local level are really just taking it upon themselves to say we have these problems and we need to find solutions and we can't wait for the feds to come in even though we need the feds to supply the often the funding. I mean I'm pretty biased because I'm from a community like the one pictured in the film and I'm a first generation college student so I think I've grown up in context where I see people building from their own context with them solved all the time. I really take your point that it's about the perspective that we're looking at for this work whether we're not gonna find it. We have very limited time but we've got time for two questions if folks wanna pop up, yeah. Hold on one second, just give me one second. I'd like to ask about what sort of correlation there is between this design initiative and the way in which it functions from ground up and the documentary film making process in which you are gathering information hopefully ground up and whether you think that there is in documentary film making now a shift away from that process and if that could be damaging to the whole field of documentary, no pressure. No, that's a really interesting question as I can think of a film that was nominated for an Oscar and didn't win this year that had some issues. That's a really complicated question. What's really interesting about documentaries is that they can be advocacy films or they can be films that kind of just unspool the story. So yes, and I always say we're never objective in the way that wherever we put the camera is where we put the camera even though we had Jamisha shooting and there's a lot of her footage in here as well so it was that kind of approach where we actually have the student working with us and her footage is there. But whatever your intent is I think you were speaking of that is really important. If your intent is to change social policy you might make a different kind of film and it might get you into trouble when you're really focused for a good cause and a good effect and a good impact but things might get shifted a little bit. So even for instance, Katie Couric's recent documentary comes to mind is another one where it was on gun control and they did say that they kind of played with the pauses and things to intensify the drama. So you have to be really kind of open about and aware of what your intent is and very careful and when you start to fiddle with things and add lines and shoot stuff later and nothing is objective. There's no reality television and I'm not talking about the Kardashians but even any kind of reality cooking show, whatever things are just scripted and so nothing is going to be objective but you try to let the story unfold. And what I love about our film is that we didn't know what the outcome would be because we kept thinking they're going to quit and we've spent all this money, we won't have a film and that's the risk you take. So there's all kinds of pressures on the documentary filmmaker as well because you're putting in a lot of money and you're raising money, you have funders, investors so you want to make a good film, you want it to be dramatic but sometimes it just can't be. We were, I hate to say it, we were lucky that Chip left and that Emily and Matt were fired in that sense that it made it a more dramatic film but who knows what any other outcomes would be but I think you have to be very careful about what your intent is because if your intent is to be an advocate, I mean I'm an advocate for changing education but you have to be very careful to let the story speak and not let your own wishes speak because then you can get into trouble and then things start to happen with films and then people start writing letters saying what you did is not correct and when you have a cause and that happens and it's not easy because you want to make a, in order for a film to be successful it has to be dramatic in some way, it has to be moving and so you have to have all of these external pressures on you to kind of sometimes push it in that direction so that's always something that at least I feel you have to be aware of and you have to be willing to say, you know, we might have to walk away from this, we might have to just let it go because there won't be a story. We were fortunate that there was a story and as I said at the very beginning you also select people who you think just who are interesting and Emily is just an interesting person she's really fun to be with, she's super smart, she has great ideas and I thought you know, no matter what happens she's so interesting that I want to know about what design thinking is I want to know what these things are so you know, we're gonna run with it. Thank you, we have time for one more. Good evening. First, thank you both so much and thank you to the filmmakers and to New America. I want to add one thing and then ask the question thing I would also humbly like to submit is that one of the other challenges is to make a film that is not accusatory nor didactic and at the same time doesn't shy away from whatever the issues that you are trying to depict on the screen which is a tall order for documentary filmmakers. With respect to this particular film and how you framed what I like to call the NGO approach which is to parachute into an area and then determine from their perspective what's best for the area not including the stakeholders. This particular film seems to me to be on various levels a civic engagement piece, a advocacy piece and at the same time I'm questioning how do you create a sustained engagement so that when the filmmakers, when the film is finished that what it has been able to depict continues to create an environment of sustainability, of empowerment and allowing those communities to give license to others to take the same type of initiative signs the cameras. That's a great question. So we keep in touch with the kids and follow the kids and now with Facebook and our website we can do that and then we developed a social networking platform called Action Lab. So if you go on actionlab.org after you see the film we give you a number of different ways to be engaged. So if you want literally to build a farmer's market in your community we tell you how to do that and how to get pro bono support from various architectural organizations. And so we've done it with another book that I worked on about soda politics and also for a museum exhibit and so we're trying to build that. So we're really interested in the after effect that what we call bridging the gap for the audience first we'll talk about the audience for the audience bridging the gap between inspiration and action so that when you see this and you say oh I wanna have a farmer's market or I wanna get EBT food stamps in my farmer's market but I don't know how to do that. Well people have done it and we can tell you how to do it and so you can click through actionlab.org and see how to do that. So that's one thing we've tried to do is give people actionable steps they can take when they're inspired. For the community it's talking about showing the film the film's been used a lot to like it was recently used in Gary, Indiana we know to build support for farmers markets and for a farmers market there and in numbers of places so it's shown often as a fundraiser to start farmers markets. In the community it's staying in touch with the kids. One thing we do that we and supporting Stevie as he sort of figures out if he wants to become a filmmaker or not. So we're around Stevie but what we typically do I also work with an organization called Venice Arts which is a wonderful organization in Los Angeles where we teach filmmaking to kids and so when we were in Mozambique for instance a couple years ago we made a film we taught a kid it's called Home is Where You Find It we taught a kid how to shoot and he was a young man whose parents died of AIDS and he was looking for a family because there's no foster care or orphanages in Mozambique and if you don't have an extended family you live on the street. So we gave him the camera and he taught him and he found someone to live with and we taught the kids photography and their photographs are in the film because we feel that it's also very important that's why we gave Jamisha the camera that we have a certain perspective but she'll get access in ways that we don't. So we give that training to the students who are interested and then when we go to different places both in the US and around the world we leave a little institute that we fund to continue teaching kids or mothers in Cape Town with HIV we did a project with them and taught them photography and we try to not recreate from the very beginning we always partner so we partner with an organization called Mothers to Mothers which teaches women with HIV how to prevent transmission to their babies and they teach other women and we taught women in that organization photography and then we sent two of them to photography school in Cape Town so we try to and I think it's really important keep something going and we also work with local photographers as well when we do our photography project so that there's somebody there who then can be paid and then we have to fundraise for that so there are a number of ways that we try to do that to keep things going so that it's not just for us like oh we wanna make a great film and thank you very much and goodbye but and it's challenging because it's often not clear what one can do and you don't wanna leave you don't wanna do something that's gonna cause problems the film in some ways when you make a film it's always an advocacy film because you're choosing the subject that you choose like when I do my dramatic shows I've never pretended to be objective it's me so that's why I chose to do teen access to abortion or vaccinations or whatever because of my own experience as a physician so I try to be open about that but I try to present the different sides and not make in this case in this film the school board looked too, I mean it was hard because they were just so intransigent about everything but it's always about power but something again you have to be really careful about because it's really easy to portray people as evil or good and you just, we didn't have access really to this, we wanted to have the school board and they didn't want to be involved and so I guess we could have said we tried to get the school board to talk on camera but then we didn't want it to feel like a news piece so you're always like struggling and that's always the struggle of the film and then when you make your next one you should kind of hopefully learn from whatever problems you had how to make it better the next time but that was a great question, thanks in terms of editing, well that's what you do you go through so many iterations just like in design thinking this what you see was a long process it was much longer probably twice as long you have to whittle out you have to decide what students to focus on so you're making decisions all the time in making this film there are a couple students you see a little bit but you don't see them very much because they dropped out or they just weren't there very much and that's the editing and so you have to decide but you try not to fake things or at least we try not to make things happen that didn't really happen or have lines later that are added because we actually need to I'm sorry to end this line of conversation but we do need to draw to a close we'll have a little bit of time for conversational lobby and I'm sorry to talk over you but I do think this is a great point to kind of let us back out into the world on which is even as we think about building with communities instead of just for them we ourselves are actors that are engaged in this process and I think that statement that you just made about the process of making the films itself and design thinking design justice iterative process is one of the most important things we can think about as individual creators and people in communities together so thank you so much for your time thank you for coming thank you New America