 Our new project is called A Path Appears. The title is from Lushan, a prominent Chinese writer, who said that hope is like a path in the countryside. At first there is no path, but as more and more people walk again and again, a path appears. Meaning a solution appears. It's about innovative strategies for making a difference. In Half the Sky, we were asking, how do you begin to tackle seemingly insurmountable problems? Is that a door? Is that a brothel do we think? Yes, it is. She doesn't have a radial pulse. She stays safe, okay? In A Path Appears, we take it to a new level. We actually look at the roots of vulnerability and we talk about solutions that really address those roots. It's easier to look at problems outside the country than it is to look at stuff in our own backyard. More than 300,000 girls get missing each year. In the United States? In the U.S. and 100,000 of them are sold for sex in some form. Nick and Cheryl use stories to capture attention. That's the signal. Police, you're under arrest, okay? That's not the reality. This is the reality. Because stories are powerful. That's her. That's her? That's Naomi. From Haiti to Chicago, from Columbia to Kenya to Boston, the central problem as we see it is poverty. This trailer is a home where they said they may have 14 people at a time. Yes. Poverty is much more than just not having enough money. It's not having hope. From sex trafficking to teen pregnancy to unemployment to substance abuse to violence against women, Cheryl and I are traveling to new parts of the world. It's overwhelming. I don't know if I've seen this much despair before. You're lucky if you're just struggling. The vast majority are just alive. At any given moment, it can turn ugly and violent. Cheryl and I are sharing real human stories of struggle, challenge, and transformation. I am tired. Are you tired? Yeah. Are you ready to go today? No. None of these problems exist in isolation. She had 14 kids. And those babies are going to grow up poor. And they're going to remain in the cycle of poverty forever. We now understand how a tiny intervention can have a transformative impact on a child's life a generation later. Oh, wow. Yes. As we take our journey, we're going to be inviting along actors to try to highlight not just the problems, but the ways to chip away at them. Hi, I'm Ashley. I'm a grateful, recovering, depressed, codependent, survivor of all forms of sexual abuse, including incest and rape. And about that, I have no shame. Welcome to the circle. I feel like I've discovered this darkness that lives in our country. This isn't falling through the cracks. This is an earthquake. It's important to keep bearing witness. Keep telling the story. Our world is now a global village. When we look at these monumental problems, they seem so daunting, but we can change the course of history. We can set these young children onto a much more promising path. One girl at a time, yeah? It all goes back to early childhood intervention in this country and of course around the world. What you have to do is dream about the future and have hope for the future, and that's how the future changes. I know I can save you, just say something, just open your mouth and tell me so that I can fix it. You know, there is a solution. It takes the parents, it takes the teachers, it takes the whole community. I definitely walk away feeling hopeful. I think that we are capable of great things. Everyone, everywhere, can have an impact in humanity through hope we can achieve our dreams. We talk a lot in this work and the book and the film about hope and the power of hope, and I guess I would just like to hear from both of you the genesis of this project and really what you hoped to get out of it, sort of how you think about print, books and film. And film is this medium. I'd like to hear from both of you sort of what your expectations were and some of the things you thought. You should probably start with the genesis of the book. The book. So after Charles and I did Half the Sky, both the book and then with Mara and the leads, then people kept coming up to us and asking what about the US since Half the Sky is mostly about the rest of the world and so what do I do? And you know it does seem to us that a lot of people really do kind of care about issues and want to engage and yet the problem seems so vast they don't really know what they can do that is and they don't seem to be solutions. And it does seem to us that over the last 15 or 20 years there really has been an emerging evidence base about what works, what doesn't work at what cost this kind of thing is just shine a light and that is one thing that Mara and I have in common. We're in the lighting business and so we wanted to cast that spotlight and my natural medium is ink on dead trees or maybe these days pixels maybe but Charles and I recognized that at the end of the day somebody is going to have to already probably be part of the choir we're going to be preaching to the choir to some degree and so if we want to build a choir and reach new audiences and get people who don't care about these issues then that's where a documentary can be very powerful that's where actresses and celebrities can play a real role and kind of reeling in people who don't care Yeah we had a lot because it was a very big part of our discussion that began without the sky was one that we wanted to do something much more and I mean even though Lake likes to refer to himself as a scribbler he was in fact one of the earliest social media entrepreneurs at the time said elsewhere I mean he has millions of followers and a very very engaged audience and in documentary and especially in public television PBS and ITBS I mean this is an obvious home for the project and the book Half the Sky began we had been read in the galleys and we were really discussing what this could be not just as a television a one-off television experience but something that really existed on multiple platforms reaching different audiences on a global scale so we really thought way too big for our britches and then sort of felt the obligation not to fail so it became a really important project then when we were in the middle of or sort of towards the end of Half the Sky and all of the what next conversations started we actually decided to continue our work together and it was interesting in a path appears because the book and the series were created simultaneously as opposed to in Half the Sky the book had been written and we knew we had to go back and find stories but there were a lot of people and a lot of agents of change and situations and issues that we knew that we were going to focus on because they existed in a best sound book with a very very big and influential following but so now we were sort of trying to learn from our mistakes but also we were both feeding off of each other and Nick as a writer and Cheryl as a writer they're able to talk about things that may be happened in the past and bring them to life on the page in our case we have to find things and subjects that are in the midst of happening because that's what makes documentaries most engaging go on a journey with a subject as they're facing their challenges so we had two different buckets that we were trying to talk about and one of the important things and it was kind of hard when we first thought about bringing talent with us what kind of talent and why are we bringing them and we're very used to having this kind of pure documentarian thread we don't really need them to but that ultimately became so clear to us that they would bring a very very very different audience to the story and that in some ways has been going on with ambassador programs I mean for years people have known this and so we wanted to find ways to authentically bring them into the circle and I think and hope we did thank you I thought that it doesn't always work but I thought these three cases were very authentic and as you said they were the leaders and they were the guides now we have like 15 between the two films and so we really looking for people who have their own authentic work that they were doing we weren't sometimes if anybody watched night one we'll have somebody like Blake Lively who it was an eye opener she's new to this space and wants to do more but she's very wide eyed and sometimes that also can be a great compliment to someone else like Evelyn Gloria who is doing an enormous amount of work in her own right already and so in a path of years we went a bit more towards people who were doing a lot of work already and of course the great thing was that they said yes it came with us because this is not a grip and grin I mean this is multiple weeks in Columbia and Haiti and places where we went for long periods of time so they were giving over a very large way you both talk a little bit though about being in the midst because it's not you and some of the decisions you make you need to put a face in the story behind the data and the problems but in some cases you're really there in real time in people's homes and in the case of Haiti you're not protecting but you are an active participant and agent how do you make some of those decisions and then you come back how do you think about engaging and then disengaging in people's lives one of the reasons to tell these stories is that it seems to us that one of the real impediments we face is that we often have policy solutions that we're aware of this country yet we don't implement them and I think one of the reasons is because of lack of political will and that arises in part I think from a tendency to kind of write off people who are struggling in society and a tendency that we have this narrative of personal irresponsibility people made bad choices and can't help them they made bad choices this scholar Susan Peskett Princeton is a fascinating work where she did brain scans on successful people looking at images of people who were poor or homeless and found that the successful people process those images as if their brains are looking not at people but at things that's what we're trying to push back at how do you do that, you personalize you put a human face on it, you make somebody compelling but that's also an intrusion in their life and some of these issues are embarrassing the first night was sex trafficking so you're talking to families that are going through this wrenching humiliating issue you're having to deal with difficult issues about minors and in Columbia about pain, pregnancy this kind of thing these are really these are awkward issues on the one hand you want to find very authentic compelling people but you want to make sure that you don't harm them in the process of your storytelling in the process of telling a story or a broader one if you don't cause complications for them and that you have their genuine consent you know which has been made to explain to them what exactly it means to do a documentary like this so there are layers and layers of complexity but it'll I think work out very very well which is partly attributed to the professionalism of our American I mean it is it's always a case by case scenario you always have to look and for every story that you that we end up following there are many many many that we don't follow for other reasons whether we think that that person telling that story would make them vulnerable to danger or violence or issues within their own family whether or not we can make an assessment as to whether they're really up to the challenge of what it means we don't end up working with people who might be a great story we don't think it's right for them but almost everybody and I'm sort of a you know a believer in people's having their own voice and if they want to speak and they feel and so many people that I've met certainly in the last five years I mean hundreds and hundreds of people they you know when very challenging very painful things they actually want to step up first they want to be heard and then they don't want the same things to happen to other people they want to become somebody who can take this incredible challenge and and rise above it and this is a process in which for some people it gives them that opportunity and so you know it never is like oh we're gonna come you know we're gonna you know we're gonna steal your life with a photo and we're gonna disappear we're not I mean that is the other thing that you have to decide as a filmmaker you know as a journalist maybe more so as a filmmaker because you're there for a lot longer I mean we're involved in all of these people's lives if you've seen you know Half the Sky I mean all of the girls that we met I mean we're involved in their next steps of education we pay for them are we finding people that are supporting them are we take them out and then you know we arrange you know in partnership with different NGOs that they're now in boarding schools and almost all of our talent end up you know becoming extremely attached to the stories and supporting them financially and other things and Nick sometimes talks about it as the billboard test you know because sometimes we end up not just following the story but playing a role in the story I mean in night one in our sex trafficking story Nick just you know it's like oh let's look on that page and see if we can find this girl and then suddenly you know five minutes later it's wait I just think I'm seeing a you know young mixed Latina and oh my god it's that girl I mean we're and that happened numerous times you know we were you know we were sort of tracking down you know a rapist of a minor in Sierra Leone in Night Half the Sky and I mean we sort of Nick was like okay you know on the whole if I drove by the billboard on Sunset Boulevard that said you know journalist, catches, rapist you know can I live with that okay I think I can live with that we would sort of you know we have to sort of figure out where that line in the sand is and the line always moves but we talk to very you know smart people about it as well I actually went to to high school with Carol Bogart Nick was in China with it and you know I started to have you know important conversations with people that I know now in this space so I'm sort of saying hey what do you think is there a line in the sand is this and it's like the line always moves and you have to use your your ethical boundaries and experience to move with it I'm going to open it up I know sometimes when you talk about these films here I should have some of the agnes we don't have that although I know in our group here tonight we actually have a lot of extraordinary activists and social entrepreneurs and people who are doing kind of work actually a little bit of love that you convey so if I so anyone who thinks that description and Brad Hody you know we're just you know signing the spot but you guys are the ones actually doing it so I want to go to the floor but I know is Pima still here oh yeah you know I just want for you to be for a minute to talk briefly about your work in India for 30 seconds and also just react with any questions that you might have thank you the film evoked many emotions it touched us it made us skeptics it was everything there because for many of us who work on the ground these stories are really powerful at the same time the practicality of it also makes us the welder which brings us to this particular thing of when art becomes activism this is exactly what I'm seeing that you are doing in my part of India that I come from Manipur which is seen as 16 year old conflict military does activism too armed forces do it so these are our things I think the few questions that I have in mind is yes you have got because New York being New York and you being a New York Times columnist and a writer you could get all these famous people but they are actors and actresses they have hearts but the real people that I felt you should have really challenged other government people they are the money they are the ones who should be doing the work that the people are doing and we have always let them go whether it's in India or here so I would like to and it really was I was pain when I saw those children of Americans children living in trailers your country has been signed the child rights convention and what you are doing about it basic things but I really appreciate what you talked about next thing being you are the American conscience in India what you do what is known is freaking the conscience I come from a part of India where we have got a martial law for 16 years and no one in India really talks about it so these are the concerns that we have I work in the area of gun violence reduction in India women's gun survivors network like the women said she took the entry of teenage mothers we took the entry of women whose lives have been cut short because of gun violence we have 20,000 registered women and husbands were simply shot dead and no one even cared about it so but yes I see similar models of the work which is done beautifully in Colombia and I think it reverberates and as you rightly pointed out many stories around the world are not told many stories of conflict of people challenge people trying to make lives but they are not told I hope today is the beginning to start telling those stories so thank you so much for inviting me Beth and thank you so much for your work it's important and we need to synergize around the world all the more thank you to circle back to the multi-platform while we're seeing the film and it's this one piece and this piece isn't in India we're actually doing a whole partnership with the World Bank on gender-based violence making a series of short films and campaigns we're working in a USA project this is all part of the movement of which the film and television is one platform we've created mobile games and facebook games there's a lot of we're sort of doing spaghetti against the wall a little bit but we have learned an enormous amount about what works and what doesn't and we do a lot of work overseas for obvious reasons thank you congratulations on the book and the film question about why did you decide to do a three-part series just curious just to know because if you try to screen the film all together it's so long but then you have to break it apart in segments it was the thought process and also in Cartagena why did you not interview any of the men seems like I'm a feminist so I'm all for women for women but it seems that the focus is always on the women and what you're going through but I think also the men need a lot of help thanks talk to the men issue because maybe in this piece it doesn't seem that in Cartagena we were particularly addressing men but I think you should say a little bit about the men piece because we agree with you in terms of men in other parts of this series and certainly our work I mean on the men front I mean there were obviously so many people who were interviewed and who didn't make the final cut and it may have to do with who was more compelling and what fit in the narrative that you're absolutely right that men have to be part of the solution too and indeed are and I think there's sometimes a misperception because terrible things are happening to women and girls that the problem is just a man it's so much more complicated than that the problem is often misogynistic, patriarchal values but those values can be absorbed and transmitted just about as effectively by women as by men and if you look at things like what is the best predictor of domestic violence or attitudes towards white feeding then it's not gender it's education and it's whether you live in a city or a rural area basically people who are more educated for example tend to think that white feeding is a bad idea people who are less educated females will of male tend to then say well what did you do and so and often because in many countries men are more educated often men are leaders in addressing some of these issues so absolutely agree with you that men have to be part of the solution that's why Cheryl and I wrote these together the sad truth is that if it's only women who talk about women's rights the issue becomes instantly marginalized it's unfair it's sad but it's the truth and these are human rights we're talking about we're all human and so on the gender issue I totally agree with you if you wanted me to answer about why is it multi parts and why is it taken to I mean it's very it's a lot of work and in terms of we had a lot of conversations with the programming team at PBS about you know in half the sky we had two hours over two nights back to back creating this event and we talked a lot about whether we thought you know just how people were consuming the content and how people were talking about the content and whether having you know that kind of like comprehensive event was asking too much of people and we were sort of comparing how many people watched it online versus how many people watched it on broadcast and you know there were just some analytics involved in that and in the end we decided to turn it into three 90 minute films instead of two hour films which I think was also helpful because two hours is a lot I mean when you're sitting and you're watching you know two hours even if you're at home and you're dedicated to this kind of content or you regularly watch independent lines in POV which everybody in this room should do it's a wonderful series representing independent voices on public television but there's you know there is you know there's a lot it's a lot to take in this stress for two hours and we found that actually at 90 minutes we were able to you know talk about the difficulties but arc to the opportunities in a better way so you know a lot of different choices go into how we lay it out but you know we always knew that this was an event it's not meant to be a single film or a single topic it's really you know Nick and Cheryl are talking about very disparate issues and we really wanted to address a lot of them and to tie them together in an overall understanding of basically the ripple effects of poverty and so while we do end up in much of this series getting to men and also men as an integral part of the solution you're also talking you know about many many things that fall doubly hard on women but that doesn't mean they're not falling on men or boys as well two more, two is good yeah I think you ask the question Nicholas with your colleague in one of the segments I think the one about Colombia and Cartagena and I know that the answer is that it is a multi prompt approach but you didn't quite get an answer so I wonder if you have one from having done the work that has been done for so many years family planning, contraception I think does need to be part of the solution in any of these programs are there condoms coming out? Are there classes system counseling even any of the men are brought in are they involved in the family planning discussion etc etc yeah I mean one of the common threads between Colombia and the US is that family planning is enormously effective and there's huge under investments in it partly because it's a difficult issue to talk about and I mean there's no silver bullets anywhere but there is there's silver buckshot there are a lot of things that help make a difference and family planning is one of those and it's enormously cost effective there was a new study by the Covenhagen consensus that every dollar invested in international family planning efforts will produce 180 dollars worth of benefits you know there are 210 million women worldwide who don't want to get pregnant but don't have access to modern family planning and in this country 30% of American girls become pregnant by age 19 30% and that's after pregnancy rates, teen pregnancy rates in the US have dropped by 50% since 1991 and there's been study after study that chose that providing long acting reversible contraceptives to American at risk girls would not only be a huge benefit to them to their kids would reduce abortion rates and would save money because you know a large like an implant or an IUD cost about $400 a Medicaid birth cost $12,000 yet so it's so frustrating that we have these various interventions along lines of family planning that not only would help these girls so much and by delaying childbirth would give avoid the situation where you have a baby having a baby and it would pay for themselves and yet we still are too squeamish to invest in them whether we're talking about Cardi Hena or whether we're talking about West Virginia and we're so also we've been going through of the of the age group and we're now so aware and we've been talking so much in the last year about early childhood intervention and what that can mean and in what ways that can happen and then there's just educating boys and girls and people staying in school and what you know what an education of a girl can be of value then you get to the next phase and it's like okay well then a girl has to have access to finance and literacy and be able in many countries where they're you know where they have an incredibly difficult time being financially empowered or acknowledged within their family unit as being of value so there's you know you sort of see the chain but each time you see a terrible terrible you know chink then it's a bigger road to climb it's a bigger road to climb so you know all of the stuff happening early I mean it started for us I think very heavily in education and then we realized how particularly difficult it was to even get to that achievement level if you've been totally disregarded you know in the you know from birth to you know through pre-k just the amount of words that you're hearing that just goes on and on I wonder if Nick and Maro have ever followed up with all these characters I was just wondering like you said in the film how can we measure the success of all these programs and what happened for example the girl you found on the back page yes we do and what are the updates of which of which stories in particular on the girl on the back page the girl on the back page is home she you know she's reunited in the end of our program and she's now in a program not a locked facility but you know she is underage and she's undergoing treatment from the support of My Life My Choice which is a really great organization in Boston anti-trafficking group but who are really involved in the next steps in recovery and she is doing very well whereas you know in contrast Savannah I think me in the film is struggling and I mean she's in communication with her mother but it's very very difficult and a lot of that sadly is because a lot of pimps get girls very very addicted to drugs and then it's you're dealing with two things you're dealing with withdrawal from a major addiction you're dealing with coming back into a family after multiple years of trauma that started when you were a young girl so we do follow up with everybody but we also don't pretend to be experts in that field and we know that what we what we do if they don't have them is we align them with services that will help them but mostly we're meeting people through NGOs that we've spent a lot of time deciding which NGOs we think are doing great work so and stay tuned on the girl from back page she's she wants to co-write a column with me about kind of lessons learning and I'm delighted I'd be delighted to work with her on that so she feels like Nick stays for a night she's very cool she went through a really difficult her pimp had a gun she was rescued that night and her pimp was armed and she's been through a lot but the larger point you made is that obviously decisions based on anecdotal evidence because there are always some successes and some failures and you can judge a program based on any individual outcome one of the things that I find really exciting is that over it's been bit by bit but over especially over the last 20 years or so there really is a lot of evidence based on randomized control trials looking at programs if they were pharmaceutical trials and so in the equivalent of if you look at family planning you take whatever five cities and you would do a careful baseline of teen pregnancy rates in each and then in one you would try comprehensive sex education and in another you would try making implants and IUDs and other porn's birth control free and in the third you would do something else and then you measure progress in each one and then you randomly assign kids to each of these and then after 5 or 10 years you look at the results and that does give you a sense of what works at what cost and people since I'm since I write about organizations they're always coming to me and saying you should write about my great work in Uganda and you know we have this great evaluation we've done of how wonderful our work is going and of course every aid group in the history of the world is always found through his own self-evaluation so you know I'm sort of skeptical of that including us so we're actually we're doing a USA trial right now with our own work I'm totally not kidding in which we are in doing forced dates in India and in Kenya to assess what is the actual impact of broadcast content and tell you know storytelling content it's okay if you become aware because you've seen it but how have you seen it and how has it stayed with you because we really we need to follow that dial towards behavior change what happens when you see these great stories what do you do does storytelling move the dial so we're doing that test so we're self-evaluating we feel good about that can I just follow up on that there's a question about the metrics in the last week there's been this remarkable story in New York where the humans of New York blog has in days crowd-sourced a million dollars for this school in Brownsville do you have a way of tracking the resources that are drawn to these programs by the visibility you give them yes we do the we have them of course on path to sky and not yet on a path to pierce we have brought directly trackable more than six million dollars to the various organizations that we have profiled and we've also in our gameplay in our Facebook game path to sky the gameplay actually triggers real world actions fistula surgeries books donated to schools and then we we work with corporations who partner so I think we've done 492 fistula surgeries at this point and donated more than 100,000 dollars worth of books which adds up to quite a number through Room to Read which is a great NGO so we look at direct cash whether those are things whether those are crowd-rise if someone watched and you can make a guess and sort of said oh I think I'll write a check for five dollars and I'll write it directly in the state of the children we can't entirely track that but we could certainly you know put a little plus after our six million because there's probably quite a bit more but yeah and that's part of our evaluation of our success yeah but you know I mean do I wish it was 60 or 600 million yes but I feel that certainly with our organizations it's given them a lot of it's given them a lot of tools to be able to tell their story and for everything we shoot we shoot so much more so we also have made over 125 other short films which we give them and they use for their fundraising purposes or they say you know we don't really need all this we really need you know Somali, Matlin, I need like a video to recruit midwives so we make Edna like an incredible recruiting video of her you know driving her car and she you know and she ends up you know filling her next midwife class which is also noted success and there's a lot we try to encourage our audience also to say it's not just about a check what do you have, what can you offer what is your skill set that you can bring to bear to find things that interest you so on our website apathapiers.org you can find out a lot about all of these different organizations and ways to directly become involved whether that's financially or through your personal skill set thank you very much for your important work it's a measurable impact and also a very helpful story so thank you for tonight