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Gillian Caldwell Turns Film into a Force for Change

As executive director of WITNESS, Gillian Caldwell spends her days helping others film shocking examples of human rights abuse, but her own story is worthy of a Hollywood movie.

Gillian has been involved in social justice work her entire life. She first recognized the value of powerful imagery as a young girl viewing a painting by Leon Golub in her mother's New York City art gallery. The picture showed a CIA-trained mercenary urinating on a political prisoner who was bound and tied and lying on the floor. His torturer stood over him as he urinated, his back to the viewer. One of his accomplices turned his head around so that his gaze caught the viewer straight in the eye.

Golub made Gillian and everyone else who looked at his paintings a “witness” in the same way – and left them wondering what they were going to do with the information indelibly imprinted in their mind's eye.

Later, while working as an attorney with the civil rights movement, Gillian jumped at an opportunity to do an undercover investigation of the Russian mafia's involvement in trafficking women from the former Soviet Union into forced prostitution. From 1995 to 1998, as codirector of the Global Survival Network, she worked with her partner Steve Galster as he posed as a buyer for a dummy company interested in importing women into the United States. They filmed transactions with the Russian mafia using hidden cameras and other tools straight out of a James Bond movie, then wrote and produced Bought & Sold, a documentary that received international acclaim for highlighting these systematic violations.

Footage from Bought & Sold was aired by ABC News, the BBC and CNN and was the subject of a major story in The New York Times. This evidence helped inspire President Bill Clinton to issue an executive order allocating $10 million to fight violence against women, with emphasis on trafficking, and it contributed to the United Nations' passage of a transnational protocol to prevent trafficking. The U.S. Congress also passed the Trafficking Victims Protections Act in 2000.

Seeing Is Believing

The success of Bought & Sold prompted WITNESS to hire Gillian as its executive director in 1998. The organization was founded in 1992 by British musician and activist Peter Gabriel, who took one of the first handheld video cameras on a global tour with Amnesty International. Inspired by the activists he met, Peter came up with the idea of putting video cameras into their hands so they could capture evidence of abuses that governments could not cover up.

Four years later, in the wake of the Rodney King beating by the Los Angeles police, Gabriel raised seed funding for WITNESS from the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights agreed to house the program.

When she came on board as executive director in 1998, Gillian realized that supplying cameras to activists was not enough. “I knew we couldn't just drop off a camera and walk away,” she said. “We had to help with every phase of the process, with training, distribution and the advocacy phase of each project.”

Under her leadership, WITNESS began providing in-depth technical and tactical training to human rights groups and has partnered with groups in more than 60 countries to expand its reach. “The point is not just, ‘What's the problem?' but also ‘What's the solution?' ” Gillian explained.

The organization currently has 12 active “Core Partner” campaigns devoted to issues including slavery in Brazil, child soldiers in the Congo, and murdered and missing women in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico. With WITNESS' support, these partners capture human rights abuses in their communities and disseminate their final videos through a sophisticated network of large media outlets, policymakers and global institutions.

Powerful Results

WITNESS has more than 2,500 hours of footage from its partners archived on its Web site at www.witnessmediaarchive.org that document a broad range of issues, including war crimes and genocides, indigenous rights, refugees, violence against women, the effects of globalization, child soldiers, environmental justice and human trafficking. The organization cites numerous successes as a result of its partners’ campaigns. Among them are:

• Legislation was introduced in California to overhaul the state’s juvenile prison system five days after a video revealing rampant abuses in the system was screened at the State Capitol.

• The film Dual Injustice, which exposes feminicide and torture in Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico, through the story of a woman who disappeared in May 2003, was a part of an international campaign for the acquittal of her unjustly accused cousin. It led to his release in June 2006.

• After A Duty to Protect was screened and distributed to key International Criminal Court (ICC) officials in November 2005, Thomas Lubanga Dvilo from the Democratic Republic of Congo was arrested in March 2006 by the ICC for enlisting and conscripting child soldiers.

• Against the Tide of History anchored a campaign that resulted in free access to prostheses by landmine survivors in the Casamance region of Senegal and unprecedented international donor and national government support for income-generating projects for landmine survivors.

WITNESS has grown rapidly, increasing its budget from $2 million to $3.4 million and expanding the staff from 18 to 24 in the past year alone. Opportunities abound for the organization. Gillian has made important connections at international conferences, where she has met heads of state, Fortune 500 CEOs and stars such as Angelina Jolie, who cohosted WITNESS’ first annual "Focus for Change" gala dinner and concert last December, which netted $393,000 and increased individual support for WITNESS by 21 percent.

Meeting the Glitterati

Gillian attributes her lack of fascination with celebrities as a reason for her ability to connect with them on a human basis; what matters to her and to WITNESS is whether or not they are committed to changing the world. In her “Davos Diary,” a blog she penned from the World Economic Forum for the BBC online, she mentions playing tennis with Monica Seles, chatting with Brad Pitt and Michael Douglas, and meeting with the head of BBC’s World News Division to talk about a possible collaboration.

With connections like these, WITNESS could continue to ramp up and take on more partners, possibly occupying the same space as goliaths Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Instead, the organization has chosen to maximize its impact and minimize its resources by offering an open-source model that allows others to use its networks and disseminate its knowledge.

The central component of this sharing model is a Seeding Advocacy Initiative that trains hundreds of human rights organizations in the basics of video advocacy each year. Under the auspices of the Seeding program, WITNESS is establishing a two-week immersion program in video advocacy through its first Video Advocacy Institute, distributing its recently published book, Video for Change, in eight language editions, and cultivating a cadre of regional allies who will be trained in the WITNESS methodology and serve as local resources for partners and other human rights groups.

Skoll Foundation funding of $615,000 over three years is helping WITNESS support the Core Partner program and Seeding Video Advocacy initiative; implement a comprehensive outreach and distribution program; and preserve and expand the size, visibility and reach of the Witness Media Archive.

For a full-length version of this profile, click here.

WITNESS is located at 80 Hanson Place, 5th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11217. For more information, visit www.witness.org, email witness@witness.org or call (718) 783-2000. Click here to order books and videos from WITNESS.

Guidelines for Skoll Awards Now Available

Applications are now being accepted for the 2007 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, which support social entrepreneurs whose work has the potential for large-scale influence on critical challenges of our time: environmental sustainability, health, tolerance and human rights, institutional responsibility, social and economic equality, and peace and security.

Initial letters of inquiries may be submitted through September 18. To read the guidelines and view a list of frequently asked questions about the awards, click here.

The awards will be presented at the 2007 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University in England.

An Update on 'The New Heroes'

We have some sad news to report. Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, founder of the Aravind Eye Hospital in India that restores sight to more than a quarter million people annually, died on July 7. Dr. V, as he was affectionately known, was the subject of one of The New Heroes segments. Our hearts go out to his family and many friends.

On the bright side, The New Heroes was among the films nominated last week for a News and Documentary Emmy Award in the cinematography category by the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. The 2006 awards will be presented on September 25 at a black-tie ceremony in New York City attended by more than 700 television and new media industry executives, news and documentary producers, and journalists.

Sponsored by the Skoll Foundation and hosted by Robert Redford, The New Heroes tells 12 dramatic stories of social entrepreneurs who bring innovative, empowering solutions to intractable social problems around the world. The series reached 4.4 million viewers when it aired last year and is expected to reach 10 to 12 million viewers during the lifetime of the series. There were 1,618 requests for House Party Tool Kits during a house party campaign that encouraged group viewings of the series.

Click here to order a copy of The New Heroes from PBS.

You can donate to New Heroes projects via GlobalGiving. Go to GlobalGiving's New Heroes page to learn more.

If you'd like to be notified of future house party opportunities sponsored by the Skoll Foundation, click here.

'Uncommon Heroes' Films Help Audiences 'Get It'

People are telling us that our new 7-minute "Uncommon Heroes" films make it easy for audiences to understand what social entrepreneurs do. Instead of describing the work of social entrepreneurs in words, our partners are using the films to tell the stories of individual social entrepreneurs who are pioneering innovations that benefit humanity.

The films were created by award-winning filmmakers Carl Byker and Mitch Wilson and were first shown at the third annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship last March. They feature Victoria Hale of Institute for OneWorld Health, which develops effective, affordable medicines for infectious diseases that disproportionately affect people in the developing world; Amitabha Sadangi of IDE-India, which provides drip irrigation systems and other income-generating technology to farmers; Ann Cotton of CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education), which helps educate girls in poor, rural communities in Africa; and Martin Burt of Fundacion Paraguaya, which supports 30,000 microentrepreneurs and has turned an agricultural school into a model enterprise. You can view the videos on our Skoll Web site at http://www.skollfoundation.org/videos/. Or, if you would like a free DVD of all four videos mailed to you, please email Phil Collis at pcollis@skollfoundation.org.

Next Year's World Forum

Mark your calendar! The dates and topic of the 2007 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship have been set. The Forum will be held March 27-29. The conference will focus on the theme “Innovation.”

More than 600 social entrepreneurs, practitioners, researchers and academics from 37 countries attended the 2006 Skoll World Forum. To be notified when registration begins for the 2007 Forum, click here.

Skoll Foundation Welcomes 4 New Employees

The Skoll Foundation has named Lance Henderson as Vice President, Program and Impact; Jason Clark as Web Manager of Social Edge; Brittany Boettcher as Administrative Assistant; and Johnny Falla as Associate Program Officer.

A seasoned foundation executive with more than 15 years of experience directing innovative programs in the social sector, Lance Henderson leads the Skoll Foundation's strategic program development, execution and evaluation, with primary emphasis on grantmaking investments and services that advance the field of social entrepreneurship.

Lance came to the Skoll Foundation from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, where he held a number of executive positions throughout his 12-year tenure. He served as the Director of Finance and Administration and later as the Director of Fund Development during a period of rapid expansion of the agency's programs, funding and infrastructure.

Most recently, Lance served as Interim Executive Director of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, leading its innovative public policy, client service and HIV prevention programs. During his tenure, the $25 million agency more than doubled in size and was widely regarded as one of the most effective and well managed HIV organizations in the U.S.

As Web Manager of Social Edge, Jason Clark is responsible for developing and implementing new functionality to enable social entrepreneurs, social benefit organizations and other interested parties to connect with one another and to share their experiences and knowledge with the community at large on the Skoll Foundation's online community at www.socialedge.org.

Prior to joining the foundation, Jason developed, implemented and managed a wide variety of Web sites, including Ingram Micro's first B2B commerce extranet and the RosettaNet community's portal site.

In her role as Administrative Assistant, Brittany Boettcher works closely with Wendy Marzetta in the executive office of Sally Osberg, President and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. Brittany came to the foundation from the Ace Capital Group in Redwood City, Calif., where she was the Senior Administrative Assistant in the marketing department.

As Associate Program Officer, Johnny Falla works with the foundation's Program and Impact team on grantmaking and partner relationships. Johnny recently graduated from Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in international relations and was the first student to complete a minor in social innovation.

While at Stanford, Johnny served as President of the Future Social Innovators Network (FUSION) for two years, the country's first undergraduate student interest group in social entrepreneurship, and he helped advocate for social innovation as an area of concentration at the university.