 Yeah, that's a good one. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Mary, for inviting me to moderate. So our theme for our next panel is going to be examining ways that we can use film and media, including social media, to amplify the Women, Peace, and Security agenda more broadly in popular culture, potentially reaching some of those people Rosa mentioned this morning, who aren't likely to come to an event with Women, Peace, and Security at the time. So I have, with me up here this afternoon, Jamie Dobie, who is the Executive Director at Peace is Loud. I have Suha Zabawa, who is the Executive Director at JustVision, and Julie Primalin, who is the Senior Producer at Let It Ripple Film. And with that, I will turn it over to Jamie. Thank you. Jess, it's great to be here today. I was last year, four years ago, maybe five years ago? Yep, two. Wow. I need to reflect on the previous decade. But it's great to see, even in the two years or however long it's been, just how the conference has grown and expanded across sectors. And I really want to thank Mary just for your dedication to this work and for providing the space for the community to continue. It's really important. So I was just shared, I'm the ED of Peace is Loud, and we're a nonprofit organization that supports and expands the reach of women peace builders around the world. We use film campaigns and a Speaker's Bureau to champion women peace builders, stories and voices, both in the mainstream media and in policymaking. And our newest program, MENA's List, provides new technology and capacity for women peace builders who are running for political office, primarily in cash-based economies, where there are serious campaign fundraising barriers for women's political participation. So all of our work is at Peace is Loud. It shows women at the center of conflicts in peace building efforts across the globe and really tries to make a case for the inclusion of women in all decision-making processes related to the peace and security of communities. So I want to share a little bit about our origination story because it helps to explain sort of how we fit into this space. So we were founded in 2013 by filmmaker, philanthropist named Abigail Disney. She spoke here, I'm not going to say how many here, five, five, six. Before I did. And she spoke here after she made her first film, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. So most of you know it's about the women's nonviolent mass action movement for peace in Liberia. It tells the story of the thousands of women who came together to demand an end to the Civil War that had been raging in the country for over a decade and their actions were really critical. They were a critical element in bringing about an agreement during the stalled peace talks. You'll be hearing from the spokeswoman of that movement tonight, Lama Bowie, who Peace is Loud represents on our speaker's bureau. And Abby, she made the film because the story of what the women had done in Liberia could not be found in the media. So there's no footage of it on the BBC or on CNN of them barricading the peace talks and intervening in the negotiations. Any media coverage on the conflict in Liberia was pretty devoted to child soldiers and bloodshed. And Abby, she said of the women, she said it seems to me that if I had to risk my life in that way, I would hope that someone would do me the courtesy of remembering my name. And so she started touring the film Around the World to get the story out far and wide and it was her experience screening the film for women's NGOs around the world that let her to start Peace is Loud. She was finding and hearing from the women that were at these screenings that there was a real need for alternative platforms and pathways for women to tell their own stories of conflict and peace building. And these were so often stories of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and peace building and stories from their own perspectives. And she saw Peace is Loud as an avenue for doing that. So with Peace is Loud, I would pray the devil back to hell turned into a five-part series that was on PBS called Women, War and Peace. And it's been seen by millions of people all over the world, 80 countries, seven continents. And in addition to Liberia, the series profiles women in Afghanistan, Colombia and Bosnia in different conflicts and asks the questions, what if we looked at war through women's eyes? What if we look beyond the familiar images and faces of war and saw women as witnesses, peace activists, political negotiators and heads of state and not only pacifist victims of human rights abuses, right? The need for the protection of women, it's part of the picture but it's not the full picture. We've heard today this morning that while women are disproportionately impacted by conflict they're also one of our greatest hopes for lasting peace. We heard the study cited this morning that women's effective participation in peace processes increases the chances that the resulting peace will last by 35% over 15 years. And we've heard about how grassroots women's participation in peace talks is an essential part of ensuring that communities needs are addressed. So the series, the film series, really placed women there at the center of that discourse about global security. And to give you a sense of the series' impact, I want to make this quote from Milan Verbier who you know is a former ambassador at large for global women's issues under President Obama. She's also the ED of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and she recently said just a few months ago on other women were in peace films, she said when women were in peace aired on national public television it was the first time the idea was put forward into mainstream media that the full participation of women in public life is essential to building strong, vibrant democracies in the US and internationally. The series made this concept relatable and urgent and it changed the way women's participation in rights are talked about around the world. And it's this idea of making women peace and security relatable and urgent that's really at the heart of our work at Pieces Loud. We've seen the films that we've worked on do that in many different contexts and I think it's because of the power of storytelling, the power of stories to create empathy and understanding to shift and change our perceptions and I think Commander Nina Kaman, I don't know if she's still here in the room but her remarks this morning I think are a testament to that. She talked about a story that she heard, a human story of the difference women made to the security of displaced communities in Haiti that led her to explore women peace and security. So to give you a sense of the types of films we work on, you saw the Uncondemned, some of you, so that's a pretty good representation but I want to show you a short preview of a brand new series that we'll be releasing next year in 2018 on public television, Women, War and Peace, Part 2. So it's a series of four new films that look at war and conflict through the eyes of women. You're the first public audience seeing this and you're going to see short clips from the four films. So you'll see scenes from a film about a network of Palestinian women activists that emerged in the spring of 1988 to lead a nonviolent social movement and you'll be hearing much more about that film from my colleague Sukha next. The second clip you'll see is about the critical role that women played in the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Then you'll see a clip from a film that profiles an all-female police force of 160 officers in Bangladesh who in 2013 joined a year-long peacekeeping mission in Haiti and then you'll see next a film about women's bodies as a political battlefield in Egypt following the Arab Spring. So let's roll the trailer. So what I want to share in the time I have left is more specifically how films like those in this new series can be a powerful tool for advancing main tenants of the women's peace and security agenda. There are three primary ways. I'd say that we've seen the first women war in peace series and other films too, like The Uncondemned, successfully utilized within the community. So first I would say the films, they can really inform and mobilize main stream audiences. Again, because of the power of stories, I think of a way of translating women's peace and security issues for general audiences who aren't necessarily well first in the agenda. And speaking of the U.S. specifically, we think that's important because it's general audiences who are the constituents who are the ones who put pressure on the policymakers and politicians to change the way they legislate. As I mentioned before, over 13 million people saw this series when it broadcast on PBS and the U.S. millions of others around the world, and we worked with the iSchool at the University of Illinois to do a sort of meta data analysis to kind of try to look at how the series was at all, kind of shifting the media discourse around the way that women's peace and security, those ideas were talked about. And so we sort of combined computational techniques, data mining, network analysis, and we looked at the topic of women war in peace, and it was this sort of empirical systematic methodology that's pretty unique in the documentary film field, just vision they do is kind of work also, and it's really important because we're really in the business of culture shift and narrative shift and looking at a change in media discourse really helps us kind of paint a picture of what's happening. And so what the analysis showed us leading up to the series and after the series over a six month period is a significant increase in the coverage of women in conflict from stories of women as solely victims to stories of women as actors, negotiators, human rights defenders and witnesses, and these weren't stories that were related to the series. Two, we've seen that the films are used as an advocacy tool on the ground with practitioners to both build their constituencies and also to influence policy makers. We've seen the films used to advocate for country national action plans for more effective implementation of 1325 across many different countries. And third is we've seen the stories used as an educational resource in the classroom and in training settings. And that's of course most relevant to this audience and I think it can be a powerful resource for a couple of reasons. One, it really addresses, I'd say these stories address one of the key principles of 1325 which is listening to what women on the ground have to say. Once we're struggling for peace in their countries every day the women peace and security agenda is often perceived to be about women, women's rights issues only but one of its powers lies in the fact that it requires and calls on the UN and international actors to engage with women-led civil society groups. And that consultation is really central to the effective implementation of women peace and security and so in teaching it's of course unrealistic sometimes and not practical, even on a budgetary level to bring in women internationally to the classroom these films can really bring those voices to the table. And so I'm just going to share one example I think I have a few seconds or a couple of examples of how the films are being used in classrooms and one is related to the National Defense University. NDU was after speaking here at this conference that the NDU screened the women war and peace film series back on campus and it became part of an effort to incorporate women peace and security into NDU curriculum and it was ambassador began who sent me a letter after the students screened the films and I'll just read part of it and then I don't need to wrap up. So he said the screening of women war and peace has been an important part of expanding the Eisenhower school curriculum regarding women peace and security issues. The films have been the centerpiece of a series on women peace and security here. One key result has been the decision to offer a 12-week elective course on women peace and security which will be the first ever for NDU. Most importantly this has been a student driven process that has increased awareness of the importance of WPS issues. It went on to talk about how WPS at the school it's not a discourse on gender preference or promotion of the goal of incorporating WPS is really to define an operational doctrine to undergird the development and implementation of strategies and policies that would lead to the successful formulation of a sustainable framework which would meet the foreign policy of security objectives of the U.S. and its global partners. We've seen those stories in a number of different contexts which I can't get into because I'm out of time. So I guess to conclude our work at Peace is loud and the work of my colleagues here it's very much grounded in the belief that stories can play a critical role in advancing the WPS agenda and I encourage you, I'll be here the rest of the day and tomorrow if you're interested talking about how to use any of our films in your classroom to incorporate into your existing curriculum we would love to talk to you about that. So it's such a pleasure to be here with all of you. I have the honor of being able to join in which Sahana and Jamie so beautifully put together with Dr. Mary Brown. I couldn't be more privileged to be in this space and to be talking about something that I love dearly actually two things both women and storytelling. And so really what I hope to offer today is in conjunction with my colleagues' work sort of the power of storytelling what we've seen work and provide kind of case examples that we can hopefully draw on about applications and adaptations to the work of the WPS agenda. As a little bit of background my name is again Sahad Baba I'm the executive director of Just Vision we're a team of human rights advocates, filmmakers, storytellers and journalists who utilize media from everything from documentary film to news media to graphic novels coupled with public engagement campaigns to highlight the work of Palestinian and Israeli non-violence leaders who are working to end occupation and the conflicts. As a little bit of background we were founded in 2003 in response to the lack of mainstream media coverage of the individuals on the ground and the communities who we believe were doing courageous and vital work but were not being picked up or not being seen and that was actually founded on about two years of intensive research from 2001 to 2003 where we interviewed 475 Palestinian and Israeli peace builders by broadly speaking and broadly defined so you have folks who were working in the field of human rights you also have folks who are working in environmental sustainability you had some folks working on reconciliation and still others who were at the front lines of non-violence direct action and we were interested in understanding in a context where there was already a civil society that had been formed and where good important work was being done what was the successes and challenges and where could we add value to what was already being done in the field and what we found and heard across the board whether we were talking about Palestinian or Israeli activists and peace builders or we were talking about women or men or we were talking about any of the various fields that they were coming from was that they felt invisible they felt invisible within their own communities they felt invisible across communities and they certainly felt invisible in the international community and because of that they felt as though they weren't able to gain traction and influence and ultimately be effective in their work and so just vision really emerged to provide a platform for these leaders now we do our work through a number of means we operate in the United States in Israeli society Palestinian society our work has been the sort of basis for briefings with presidents of the United States senior advisors like Ben Rhodes and Valerie Jarrett briefing the NSA Foreign Service and diplomatic wars we also partnered with mainstream media outlets like The Guardian to air work that highlights what's happening in places like East Jerusalem and the impact of policies on local communities timed with arrival of the United States president in Jerusalem for example and likewise we've also worked with pre-military students in Israel who oftentimes are at the front lines of contending with non-violent actions university students and activists women's groups, refugees and students across Palestinian society to provide role models and success stories that help inspire and inform strategies on the ground today now throughout our body of work we include a gender lens and it's a critical component of how we see this work for a few reasons for us one of the key reasons is that the role of women in society is a key indicator of how pluralistic a society is both at the moment and at the formation of post-conflict and political transitions the second piece is that we know that in asymmetrical conflict non-violent movements have 100% are 100% more likely to succeed than armed movements now interestingly and this is drawn and inspired by the research of folks like Maria Stefan and Erica Chenoweth Victor Assal Marie Barry one of the key indicators of whether a non-violent movement is both sustainable and able to succeed is not the ideology of that movement regarding left center rights, political formations or approaches it's not how repressive a regime is whether authoritarian or whatnot it's actually that movement's ideology about the role of women in public life and the third piece that actually brings me to the importance of visibility which goes hand in hand with storytelling being able to celebrate and lift up the role models within society of women who are contributing to these efforts is critical in Israel and Palestine it's actually surely the case that there's a backsliding of rights for women in the region as we're seeing across the globe in so many contexts but women are fundamentally at the front lines contributing in incredible ways and yet they're not being seen often times even in the case of non-violent movements in the rare cases that these stories are actually being covered the media often goes to male leaders for photo ops for interviews and that delegitimizes the crucial role that women are playing and also impacts their growth and bias and leadership both in the movements as well as political leadership the day after so I want to actually share a sort of case that we're working on a documentary film which will be released later this year and we're so excited to be working with pieces loud on that as part of the women War and Peace II series as a little bit of background on that we decided to tell the story of the women who were in key leadership positions during the first insufferza which is the first Palestinian uprising that began in the late 1980s the first insufferza was largely unarmed in nature it's considered by most academics and scholars to be one of the most disciplined non-violent movements not only in Palestinian history that arguably across the last century and yet for those of us who have the visual memory of the time the first images that likely come to mind are going to be stone throwing molotov cocktails burning tires military incursions it's not a surprise those were the stories that dominated the headlines at the time but in reality the movement was made up of ordinary folks there were teachers and farmers there were students and elderly they cut across gender lines class lines religious lines political factions and it was quite unified bringing out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in sustained fashion for several months and years as we conducted research around that period of highly complex movement one of the things that surface that was surprising to us we knew that women participated in the movement what we didn't realize was that women actually critically ran the underground leadership for the 18 months that are considered the most disciplined and sustained and effective carried of the movement and when we learned that we knew that we had a story that had not only a profound impact on people to transfer lessons learned to the next generation but also a global theme that has universal resonance as we're thinking about the role of women's leadership across the board so I want to share a couple of can you hear me yeah great so I just want to share a couple of sort of key takeaways and then I'd love to hear any questions that may surface from all of you in this panel discussion it's very important for us to take a look at both for its successes and its limitations so often when we look at long-term conflicts we lose sight of the historical milestones that have led us to the point of where we are today in the case of the first instance it does a well it failed to achieve a lasting piece in the what it achieved is significant and notable in that it generated enough pressure both on the international community and on the government to recognize Palestinians as a people with the right to self-determination for the first time just to put that into context the main plan on the negotiating table up until that point was the Jordanian absorption plan in other words Palestinians would be absorbed under the Jordanian government which is equivalent to an ethnic cleansing under international the other piece that I just want to underscore is that on one hand I care about the story being documented for posterity if you believe that there is inherent value in ensuring that the stories of the many women who will be featured in this documentary are accessible to the next generation and that their legacy should be documented and recognized for their contributions at the time but it's not for posterity alone stories like this and I think beautifully but have the power to have radical transformation in the way that we think about women the way that we think about what's possible and in shifting perceptions around deeply divisive issues like Israel-Palestine and certainly on issues about women's role and leadership we have seen how films like our previous documentaries Boudreuse and My Neighborhood and hopefully this one have been utilized by military officials by security to not only understand what's happening in Israel and Palestine more deeply but to also think about what are the pressure points and what are the strategic avenues for change and who are the people who can actually affect change locally and on a global scale and that's crucially important we've also seen the power of films like this to be able to shift into visual perception so when we're looking at making the case for WPS and building leadership within our institutions around the importance of pipelining women into leadership positions I think it's critically important that we find the influencers sit down with them make sure that they know these stories and these data sets so that they also are able to be able to make the case and in some cases potentially have a mind shift and have that heart shift that's necessary for this work to ultimately gain passion there's some really fascinating research that's kind of out of the storytelling field around the power of films and storytelling to shift macro narratives as Jamie beautifully talked about in the impact of having stories like WP Women War and Peace mainstreaming on public television and what that means for the broader discourse there's also beautiful research that's been produced by folks like out of institutions like MIT the University of Pennsylvania looking at the impact on individual perceptions and building both empathy and that then translates for audiences into behavior change and so if you're interested in that I'll save you the gory details of data for now but I'm really, really happy to get you access to that material if it would be useful to you Jamie and Sahad for it's been an honor being on this panel with you and learning about your work more deeply and Jamie thank you for moderating and Mary thank you so much for inviting us here Jess I'm sorry and you exactly too so my name is and very thank you for inviting me my name is Julie Hermelin and I'm a senior producer at Let It Ripple films and I'm going to talk about I'm going to talk about bringing this conversation into the popular culture our work at Let It Ripple we make short global films for global change and we we really operate in the mainstream space I'm a co-producer with Sawyer with that Tiffany Shlain who founded Let It Ripple and also founded the Webby Awards and Sawyer Steele we co-wrote and produced a film called 50 50 rethinking the past present and future of women and power and we also off that film created a global day of conversations around gender equity called 50 50 day a little bit about the film so the film looks at the 10,000 year history of women in leadership and the progress we've made and the setbacks we've had and the progress we've made and the setbacks we've had and the progress we've made and that's the question what's it really going to take to get to a gender equitable world and it also and it also looks at the challenges and opportunities for men as old stereotypes no longer work and gender roles open up and this film premiered at Ted Women two weeks before the election and after the election we decided to really double down on the issue and that's when we decided to produce this global day we'd had experience with global days we've done that with others of our films we have a global day called character day that's in its 40th year right now which last year we had 65,000 friends around the world talking about allowing people to have the opportunity to have conversations about the latest the latest social science around character development and how you can be better global citizens and so we said we decided to really double down on this issue right there at the red line there we go so in our researching of the film and our films are very pop they're made for an internet audience they're highly animated they're deeply researched highly animated funny engaging emotional and provocative but as we see a majority of people around the world believe gender equity is very important in fact about 65% as a medium so attitudes are changing and especially attitude in the United States but the actuality the practicalities are not there yet if we look at this 91% of the United States well women are only 19% of Congress 10% of our Governors 6% of our CEOs and women make up two thirds of our low wage workers so just wanting change just being okay with it like that's not going to get us there so what gets us there so what gets us there and this is kind of what we are looking at with 50-50 day is bringing intentionality behind that attitude behind that change so how are we making this an intentional gender equity mindset something that we can work for across every sector and at this point I just want to talk about one thing a little bit of a personal detail about me I'm a single mother of three preteen boys that are virtual triplets two thirteen-year-olds and a twelve-year-old and so I'm in a house of boys I'm outnumbered I want them to pick their crap off the floor and I also really want them to know that it's not just women that take care of them so I hire male babysitters and have and got pushed back to my someone paraphrase my women friend really are going to go male babysitter that's kind of odd like no actually because men need to take care of children too because I'm a working mother I'm a producer and I'm a filmmaker and it's really important that a woman's point of view is central in the stories that are out there in the world that women are creating these stories that you see on television because there are more women filmmakers done current while a great film but how many films have we seen where you don't see these stories in the broad audience Hollywood blockbuster films of an all-female combat troupe right one day that will happen but not yet anyway so I digress for a moment just to say that these gender equity issues impact everything so I want this moment to stop and play the highlight trailer of our of our 5050 day and then I'll go on to talk about our career so how are we pushing ourselves to make this change that we want to see this was a billboard in Times Square it was up for three months before 5050 day and then after 5050 day so again how are we making this issue top of mind in general consciousness right so as people are operating in their general lives they're thinking about this and I'd like to also point out that this is not called women's 5050 day it's just called 5050 day it's really intentional and it doesn't diminish the need for women to be top lined at conferences and women's spaces and in the workplace it doesn't negate that but what we're looking to do is create a different space that everyone can participate in the conversation because men also need to have a space to talk about these issues of masculinity the stereotypes that they brought up against we need to be able to have these conversations together and so that's why we are we were thinking about that with this name and also all the materials that we created have that approach so we like to say that 5050 day is for all genders and all ages this is our approach we have a film at the center discussion gets millions of voices and the idea is that when you look ten years down the road where are the people today that are going to be our decision makers they're 15 to 25 they're on YouTube and Netflix and Snapchat and they're swimming in this world of popular culture and so as I said our films really are my background is I was a music video director for almost a decade and so that's where I'm coming from how am I speaking in the local language and so the film becomes a springboard for this day so where does this change need to happen obviously it needs to happen in the women peace and security space but where else well it needs to actually happen everywhere honestly and instead of going somewhere else to make this change we're actually inviting people to activate the change where they are to be the drivers of the change locally with communities that they are accountable to every day and what the specifics of that look like is different depending where we are what you need and what you're knowledgeable about so what 5050 Day does is it provides a topical framework and then with the film and the discussion kits and this global live cast Q&A that you saw we provide a simple like plug and play tool kit so anyone anywhere can create an easy and meaningful event to either jump into dark talking about this issue within their community or take the next actionable step from where they are what does gender equity look like right here in this office in this school in this institution city my home how are we holding ourselves accountable to our own benchmarks and some of the countries as you saw we have 11,000 events we honestly thought we were going to have 1,000 events I mean we were the first year that we did character day we had about 1,200 events based on that model we had about 1,200 events we were kind of bootstrapping it for the first year we had 11,000 events we had 60 countries hosting events Germany, Canada, France, UK, Nigeria Antarctica, Hong Kong, Poland, Australia Guam Spain, Belgium, Uruguay, Mexico they come to you we have just something to talk about so this is actually the poster that goes along with our discussion kits because again, gender equity isn't a single issue it's a lens through which we can look at everything and so what we've done here is tried to really simplify some of the top line issues and we're still this is something that's fluid and we're probably going to be redoing it again we can all get in big debates about what is here what isn't here we worked with Rutgers and the Wilson the Wilson Policy Institute the Women in Public Service Project to do this research to put our discussion kits together and again, we're really looking to make this accessible to a popular culture audience and try to create an easy way to have some potentially intense conversations these events happen privately in people's homes in people's offices in schools in nonprofit institutions and so each one of these circles represented an issue card and on the back of these issue cards these are our discussion kits were another list of five or six issues that fell underneath these issues within a couple of stats and then it came with a stack of question cards open-ended questions so that people could have spring awards for rich conversations and so we'd like to think of ourselves as a place that's building a bridge between the work people are doing at research institutes and policy centers and think tanks and the popular culture so we're bringing people we're connecting places that are seemingly diverse as the Women in Public Service Project as I said the Wilson Policy Center and Funny or Die and these are just some of the people that came on board and we are topic agnostic we'll take everyone that wants to come in and a lot of these places hosted their own events they broadcast the event themselves to their networks to encourage them to participate so how does 50-50 day work so as I mentioned we have wait that's right this is our trailer which you can see online I'll show you the highlight reel and here you see the whole picture so how does it work we have our film we have our discussion kits we have private events we have public events and then panels and then we have this global live cast where you really saw that mashup of think tank and policy and business leaders and that streamed on Facebook Live for 12 hours and we have people that were and we had people that could ask questions and we were taking questions with them that's the picture of the discussion kits and we also work with a number of different social media platforms and we like to think that 50-50 day is that we social media companies can make their own campaigns and tailor them around this idea of gender equity they know their audience is best and we invited them to participate with their own creativity makers for instance which does incredible profiles on different women they curated an entire section of our site with their films according to our category issues so people that were interested in any of these different categories could go on and find profiles of people that are being very active in the space funny or die made a number of these news flashes that you'll see up there Refinery29 did a whole site takeover of 50-50 day with Eva Longoria working off-ed about the work he was in Fentston Foundation they made an interactive HIGAP calculator and then some of the actual things that happened on 50-50 day during the Q&A Reid Hoffman the co-founder of LinkedIn committed to gender balance guest bookings on his podcast on his hit podcast Master's of Scale no show with guest bookings has ever committed to that idea imagine if they would imagine if more places would Google and YouTube with the opportunity of 50-50 day to announce that they were going to be producing a show called a show called Girls in Tech and they're committing to gender equity equitable creative teams female directors with male writers male directors with female writers so these are just a couple of the things that ended up happening without a push from us so next year we're looking to expand and build this initiative we're looking to make pledges find ways for people to hold their businesses and their companies and their homes and themselves accountable to these ideas and what opportunity does this provide for the women peace and security agenda perhaps this shows how this is actually not an outlier idea just through this just through crisis zones and conflict zones and war but this is actually fundamentally linked to every aspect of our society gender equity isn't a women's issue it's an everybody's issue it's a global issue and the more that is top lined and thought about by everybody the more it helps all of us occupied territory in Israel in 86 love the future so well I was wondering so in 86-7 and at Ashrawi female activist with one of the main leaders and she's Christian and I was wondering if if you worked on whether religion faith a goal especially with Muslim religion a little bit more pronounced in the culture because back then it was not so pronounced in the order of Muslims and Christians of course but in Jews but with Muslim etc etc using religion wondering how these women would repeat that sure so we interviewed about 24 Palestinian women who were involved in the movement at various levels so you had folks who self identified as illiterate and yet they were the lead in transferring key communication between the PLO and around leadership you had folks who were part of the political elite folks like Hanan Ashrawi you had folks who were everyday students who became the backbones of the movement and fueled it for almost four years one of the things that's so remarkable about those interviews and we interviewed many of these women on multiple occasions for hours upon hours and when we asked the question about the role of religion and that's one of the things that several of them said and reiterated several times was that look like we would start a march in front of a church and end at a mosque we didn't even think about the role of religion because ultimately this was not an issue about religion what Palestinians were unified around and continues to be the case is that this is actually a liberation struggle a right for self determination and Palestinian populations themselves are quite diverse you have secular communities you have Muslim communities you have Christian communities and beyond one of the things that I think is fundamental for us to understand in prolonged and sustained conflicts and in cases where you have populations that are repressed over time you one of the things that we see very quickly happening is the rise of conservatism in filling power vacuums and religion and we're seeing this globally happening is quickly the thing that becomes co-opted so where what we often hear in the mainstream media is that this is a religious war that this is something about Muslims and Jews who are in an intractable battle that's been going on for thousands of years in fact when you're actually on the ground you realize very quickly that that's not the case and I think this is one of the stereotypes that we need to undermine the role and the co-optation of religion is something for us to be thinking about and to be concerned with and I just actually came back from Israel and Palestine and one of the ways that a colleague, a friend he's both a business leader as well as an activist and a community leader in Palestinian society when he in response to the question that I asked him about the rise of conservatism across the region fundamentally this is an issue of pluralism this is an issue of pluralism around the world right now how do we deal with difference how do we incorporate the well-being of all of our communities and the longer that we are in a position where we're in occupation and conflict the easier it is for people to say the concern of diversity and how do we hold all of our populations become sidelined I think I've heard it earlier someone saying you know in the context of our military institutions in the context of WPS so often we hear the argument of I'm dealing with a crisis that's more important than women right and I think to some degree we're looking at a parallel in when we we are dealing with a case of pluralism in the region I hope that responds to your question. So we are a non-profit organization about 60% of our organizational budget is completely fueled by individual donors the remainder of our budget is fueled by small to medium-sized family foundations primarily and I think one of the things that is critical about the role of storytelling and what's possible in today's age is that a quality film that tells a compelling story can achieve quite a lot for relatively minimal resources so I'll give you an example with Boudreuse our last documentary which tells the story of a Palestinian community in the West Bank called Boudreuse that in 2003 to 2004 they waged a 10 month nonviolent campaign to stop the Israeli separation barrier from being built on its lands the barrier would have cut through the cemetery down the girl's school and confiscate the vast majority of the agricultural lands of the village which was the main livelihood of the community and they end up convening the men and women of the community sort of unify the political factions so you have Hamas and Fatsan and Islamic Jihad and welcomes in both Israelis and internationals in a unified position they're ultimately successful now when that story was actually developing on the ground in the few cases where there was coverage of what took place there the frame that was in the media was that these were riots and clashes and that the residents were breaking the law and order there by justifying the arrest and the repression of the movement now because of the work that we've been doing because we're on the ground we knew that wasn't the case that in actuality it was quite disciplined, quite sustained and used civil disobedience tactics that are reminiscent of what we've seen here in the United States and what we've seen work across the globe and so we decided to tell this story in Budur's now we released the film in 2009 and we ended up having the good fortune of a public relations company Edelman conduct a media audit to understand to what degree did we able to actively effectively shift the narrative around the events of Budur's so what they did is they looked at the time period from 2003 to 2011 and from 2003 to 2009 so pre-launch of the film but they found was that 30% of media coverage around Budur's was generated during that time the vast majority of the stories were told in the framework of this being riots and clashes and breaking the law and order now from 2009 to 2011 so from the launch of the film through our public engagement campaign what they found was that we generated 70% of coverage from the top outlets CNN, New York Times, BBC and so forth but most importantly is that we had a 91% message penetration rate that highlighted three key themes the important role of women in leadership in the movement unity across divides specifically around political factions and the efficacy of non-violent resistance now I also come from a political campaign background and have kind of likes in that world for folks who work on political campaigns you can port millions of dollars tens of millions of dollars in stable communication strategy and you're considered to be successful if you hit a 10 to 15% message penetration rate so now let's put this into context Budur's was about $450,000 to produce now that's not small pocket money that's significant but I just want to put that into context of the scale of the challenge that we're dealing with and what can possibly be done and I think if we strategic we leverage our resources we've actually achieved quite a bit I'm Sean Sullivan from the Naval War College I have a question for Ali is that you're in this enterprise is a storytelling type of an enterprise I was wondering how do you select who tells the story and are there certain topics provided in MP security type ventures that you do that it's more effective to tell the first person versus the third person observer versus narrated Do you mind repeating that question one more time? Yeah, what I'm talking about is how do you determine who tells the story because all these tell stories so how do you determine what perspective you want there's certain topics that are best in the first person versus narrated or do you want me to go first? I think it really depends on the story I don't know if I can answer that universally I think that with our work it's very important that we are allowing the women to tell their own stories the women who are in these conflict areas they're not behind the camera however it is that when you're asking who's story is this to tell I think that there's always an inherent subjectivity in any documentary film because you're always looking at it you can be as objective as you try to be objective and present the truth as you see it but it's always told through a lens and it's your lens the person who is behind the camera I think in a perfect world I don't know if you would agree with this the people whose stories are being told would be telling the stories also I think that's just not the reality in terms of resources and training and the world we live in but I think there are certain topics that are best delivered by first person or best delivered by narration or people that observe the people I think about credibility issues and political bends or ideological bends do you want to take that one? so I'll just ground in our approach to just vision and speak to the questions that I think are relevant in our context so there's a couple of key principles about the kinds of stories we tell one, they've got to be come from so one of the things we need on this question of credibility is that so often on the issue of Israeli-Palestinian you'll often hear where are those really solidarity activists or where are the Palestinian Gondis and there's a sensitivity and a really important sensitivity to pay attention to about external forces imposing Gondian style long violence or sort of MLK style long violence on the Israeli-Palestinian context and what that actually kind of subverts is the fact that there's already several local strategies and examples that can inspire and motivate and move people without running into the sort of power dynamics that may play out if you're bringing in a story that's external as a model it's important to us that the stories are homegrown and that there are stories that are being told through the perspective of the individuals and the communities that are being reflected that's one. The second piece to, for us one of the, we've actually talked about this piece about narration do you have a narrator, do you not and so on, that was a big piece about the story of the first sensefaza that you saw, part of the problem with that film is that it's 30 years ago that the access to archival materials are quite limited already by virtue of this being a historical documentary you include the fact that a lot of the individual's materials of folks who were documenting for themselves that destroyed as part of a military campaign to destroy evidence of what happened and you have really limited materials so we actually oscillated this way and okay, do we bring in a narrator or do we find another way to bring this story to life not to have a narrator for a couple of things one, in this case it took away from the stories of the women themselves and the other piece is that it imposes a lens that on this issue often times people question the credibility of voices and so having the credibility of the individual speaking for themselves is actually what's really important to us is that we ended up doing is we built in areas where we lacked media content so it sort of illustrates the story with animation and everything's going to be a case by case basis the second point that I'll just make is that for Just Vision it's really important that we're accountable storytellers what does that mean so with the story of Udruz that I had just described previously, there were several different activists, you had Ayat Morar who was the sort of lead community organizer who began the campaign you had his daughter Ilta Zan Morar who organizes the women's contingent you had Yasmine Levy who was an Israeli border police who was a patrol person who was confronted with non-violent demonstrations on a daily basis you have Theron Spielman who was the Israeli commander who was overseeing those events and then you have Kogi Smith who's an Israeli activist who was involved before we launched the film it was really important to us that we reach out to each of them to show them the film for two things one was accuracy, making sure that we have the story correct we're highly researched and fact based so we had done our work but we wanted to make sure it lined up with their experience in telling the story the second piece was harm we wanted to make sure that we were viewing no harm so that if there were incidents where it could potentially lead to damaging consequences either as political retribution or kind of alienation within the community or so on and so forth we would take that as a consideration in our edit so those are some of the sort of principles that we think about from story telling lines and the determinations that we make I was just going to add one quick thing to that which is I think documentary filmmakers they often get criticized for not being balanced and not showing all perspectives in all sides but filmmakers trying to defend their decisions and I think the reality is I think that a usual point of view and it's partly when a piece is loud our job is to take the film and to figure out how to maximize the social impact of the film but also how to give the context necessary to be able to understand the full picture the film is a point of view always but it's a piece of a larger conversation two more questions ok so thank you all for your presentation I'm really interested in what you were kind of all talking about which is getting to culture shift, culture change and your project is primarily via social media and then kind of your more traditional medium-ranked people and I guess I'm wondering from your experience and those different outlets what do you think is next I mean we didn't have these films four or five years ago this kind of needs and exists now to be exciting than it does but now that you're doing it what do you think is the next lever because if we're talking about the next decade what do you guys see from where you're sitting in terms of culture shift and shaping the message and what kinds of things you may not be thinking of to be using right now that we could be using or is there another direction that we're not seeing as experts in the field but we're not experts in media or communication that we could be using that so as you're looking at your resources in your classrooms in general I want you to be really aware of who is presenting the story no matter what story it is that you're having presented there's this thing in Hollywood called the Bechdel test and I don't know how many people know this the Bechdel test which is actually this woman Alison Bechdel who has a graphic novelist right now but it's how many lines how many speaking lines a woman has in a film and if the film doesn't pass the Bechdel test and unfortunately many many films don't so think about and it's most base level think about who's delivering this culture as media to your good when you're when you're using language in your textbooks what's the gender of the language that you're using or using gender neutral language this isn't as huge as these stories and I don't want to diminish that but when you're talking about things like unconscious bias which is really key and in America right now I was in a room of phone bank people as the it was being covered by a new story the room was all women except for one man and the reporter came in and went to the man to ask the question about the experience of being of doing phone banking and I turned to the camera person and I said that's not okay that's not appropriate because we're in a room full of women right now who are doing these phone banks and this is actually the case in journalism and news that most of the time it's men that are telling the story they were the ones on the ground talking so in your curriculums think about that is there a woman's story that can illustrate this same general point that might illustrate it that isn't just a woman's story just so happened to be coming a girlfriend of mine is a filmmaker and her film company is called Topple Productions for Topple the patriarch and she has a line that says women can make films women can make films for the next 150 years only they can do a lot of media and they're writing a number of films they can find them about them so you have the agency to at least choose what it is for I don't think the future is in virtual reality whenever people can tell you I often joke it's true that women's peace and security is a growth industry I think we all made a good decision but I think that these issues are only becoming more and more relevant and the demand is growing and thinking about security in a broad way I think is happening more and more in terms of platforms for these stories I think online short form content is the future I think that in terms of documentary things like Doc Docs and The Guardian and these short three to five minute films are what people are wanting these bite sized stories I think also and I know that there's the argument in terms of influencing decision makers which is part of the culture shift is it the stories that they need the stories of the data I think there are different things every week it's like one week they need more data the next week they need more stories and we talked about this a little bit yesterday but in terms of the data last night we had a conversation with E.J. Graff who is the managing editor of the Monkey King agent The Washington Post and I think that's a great model that we're going to see a lot more of in the future it's recognizing that there's so much academic really really valuable and isn't being translated to a popular audience it's staying in folders on desks in classrooms and what the Monkey Cage is doing is finding these academics to write their research for a popular audience and their readership is huge and their state or people who are relying on this research is something that is consumable and it's packaged in a way that is actionable so I think we're going to see more and more platforms like the Monkey Cage respond to it in a slightly different way hopefully so the first piece that I would say is that when we talk about culture shift we're talking about something massive and so much of the time we think about this in terms of scale we're bigger and better than we're going to get more impacts and one of the things that I think that we need to assess is who do we need to reach who's critical in driving the mainstream conversations and how do we reach them so so much of the work that we do on Israel-Palestine we're a small and equal team right it's an assessment of resources compared to what kind of impacts we want to have so our strategy is actually on two levels one it's looking at how do you shape the social norms on this issue and that's looking at key audiences like the press and journalists editorial boards thought leaders global platforms like world economic forums have global access to sort of thought leaders who have the power to reach broader constituencies it's also looking at who are the key populations that are key stakeholders in this issue here in the United States for example that looks like faith communities and traditionally monolithic faith communities Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities it looks like university students both because of the historical role students have played on galvanizing social change efforts in the United States but also because university campuses are one of the key hubs for activation on Israel-Palestine likewise within that same sort of rationale it's reaching the educators who we know are key access points to students in terms of being able to shape or not shape their political views at a very crucial moment in their development and their political development so it's one the first piece is thinking about target audience becomes really key when you're looking at creating culture shift and incremental culture shift I think the other piece that I would know is thinking about what is the right medium for the right and I'll give you a story that from our own evolution and lessons learned I think of justice and optimism as an organization constantly re-evaluating ourselves and constantly re-evaluating based on changing dynamics in the field and in the media industry and globally several years ago with our last film Boudreuse we applied the same sort of multi-pronged strategy in the United States in Israel and Palestine where we're looking to shape social norms at the sort of culture level and also reach key target audiences in Israeli society one of the things that we were running into was that on a community by community basis we were seeing pretty sort of mind-blowing individual transformation so we were working with pre-military students for example in Israel who were inscripted in the military and opted into an educational gap here that is meant to enhance their military service these are sort of your elite students they go on to oftentimes become commanders of military units and hold prestigious roles in the political and media spaces and we would screen films like Boudreuse and afterward folks would say knowing what I know now I can't possibly serve that's a mind-blowing transformation now part of the challenge though was that at the same time in Israeli society we were seeing a rightward swing where increasingly so you were seeing the Israeli public become more conservative in their views to be Palestinians and also electing officials who had really troubling racist sort of ideologies around Palestinians and there was a shrinking space for civil society and in that environment we started to ask the question of is our strategy through film sufficient in achieving our broader aims and we actually came back and said alone that strategy is not working we're not able to penetrate the mainstream media space and we were trying we would see you know on occasion we would have amazing journalists who write beautiful stories that capture the holistic nature of the movement and community it goes through that editorial board it gets that out and it's hardly recognizable or we would work with a journalist who would say you know like who would pick up the language of non-violence but it would become kind of exceptional in its frame so it's the good Palestinian priest doing this and for us we were like wait a second there's stereotypes that we're trying to undermine here so we sort of step back and we said how do we actually reach the mainstream let's go back and do a needs assessment we sat down with editorial boards and journalists and they were quite honest with us they said but there's either no appetite in the Israeli public for the kinds of stories that you want to tell on human civil rights issues or they would say it's not politically viable those were the two responses and we said okay well in that scenario what can we do to influence the mainstream public narrative we decided to launch our own news site now when we decided to do that many of the folks in the field kind of looked at us like we were going to fail and they said it was a ludicrous idea and there's no way you're going to gain traction in that space there's no way the mainstream public is going to pick up on this and it's been three years we have 2.5 million unique readers and that is a context it's about a population of 8 million in Israel so we're talking about reaching one out of every four Israelis the same mainstream media outlets that said that these stories wouldn't find the Israeli public are now seeking us out to partner on our content because we're seen as more credible in very specific constituencies that now are seeking us stories that we're scooping and we're the only ones that have access to them similarly we know that political leaders across the political spectrum even if they disagree with our position or our orientation or our value system are paying attention to our content because they're either calling us for exclusive interviews or they're calling us to ask us why we would publish something along the lines of what we publish so in that context I think the takeaway for me is adapt, adapt, adapt ask yourself really what are you trying to achieve and where are you trying to reach and build your strategy from there when your goals leave strategy follows so identify what your goal is and then work backwards this is similar with our adaptation of Boudreuse's film to a graphic novel we realized several years back that when we were thinking about when we were thinking about who we were reaching in the Palestinian society we were missing a key contingent so we were working primarily with university students across the board you have 70% of the population is under the age of 30 what that means is university students are not sufficient you're actually seeing students getting politicized at high school and middle school and so we said we need to reach a younger audience there documentary films are actually quite a hard medium for that audience so we said what is the other medium that we could utilize here graphic novels are actually quite important and as a way of storytelling so I think our mediums today are vast so we have different ways of actually reaching our goals so that's one piece I think the other piece is while we have channels like social media and we're seeing really amazing things like monkey cage and so on emerge the constant question that we should be returning to and asking ourselves is in an environment where there's information saturation now this is going back to the question of unconscious bias we as people naturally gravitate to information that reaffirms our world views so one of the things that we have to ask ourselves is if this is an issue and WPS if we're dealing with an issue that is actually about shifting the way that people see the world that needs to be part of how we're thinking about our strategy for distribution what are the kinds of stories, what are the means to actually get people to sit down in a diverse of story and actually sit through and absorb a narrative that they may disagree with otherwise and this is where documentary film becomes incredibly powerful and I would actually add if this is actually something that is virtual reality this is something that is virtual reality one last comment you don't want to say that that is a future tool but having experienced some of the some of those some of the virtual reality films especially the ones that are working in the political space thank you very much really appreciate it a round of applause for our final comment thank you