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Telling Stories, Building Movements: Can a Film Change Wal-Mart?

By Lisa Smithline, Executive Director, Brave New Foundation

al-Mart is America’s largest employer. Rather than set the gold standard in corporate responsibility, it is defining the coal standard, leading business in a race to the bottom.

Is the Wal-Mart way the price of the new American dream? Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, the newest documentary project from Brave New Films, the directing and producing team of Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed, Uncovered) attempts to answer this question.

Greenwald’s film is a targeted, unfiltered look at the real Wal-Mart, as it contrasts with the carefully manufactured corporate image it strives to project in its advertising campaigns, corporate sponsorships, and even reality television shows. The film is a powerful, emotional, entertaining, and visual means to jumpstart a massive public awareness effort, which can (and will) lead to a demand for policy change in the way the company conducts business in the U.S. and across the globe.

Film as an Organizing Tool
How often have organizations focused on social change complained that the media is ignoring their story? In a media age dominated by celebrity trials and missing white girls, it is a constant battle to break through the noise. Brave New films targets under-reported issues that are ripe for a larger audience with a simple model:

1. Make a film that can win people’s hearts and minds.

2. Build a broad alliance in support of a worldwide grassroots film release.

3. Use media buzz, a multi-platform distribution plan and guerilla media strategy to reach as many people as possible with the film.

4. Activate the inspired and motivated to take action, strengthening our allies with an infusion of new energy to support each organization’s long-term goals.

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1574

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1575

Local Power Can Change Wal-Mart: The ACORN and Jobs with Justice Organizing Strategy

By Sarita Gupta, Jobs with Justice, and Helene O’Brien, ACORN

al-Mart, the country’s largest employer has a profound and widespread impact on Americans’ daily lives. Wal-Mart provides us with $3.47 pairs of shorts, as well as affecting the taxes we pay, the wages we earn, the streets we drive on, the air we breathe, and the crime we experience.

To change this company’s practices will require a movement that is broad enough to confront the company across the country (at least), but deeply rooted in the local communities that are the source of our strength. ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and Jobs With Justice have come together as two national networks of grassroots organizations to build such a movement. Our goal is to share winning strategies, build power in local communities to win concrete victories, and develop innovative grassroots strategies that engage consumers in a meaningful way. This struggle targets Wal-Mart, but is also larger than Wal-Mart – it is about setting and defending standards in our communities for the long haul.

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1578

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1580

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1099

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1584

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1573

Two-Way Street: Labor-Community Partnership and SEIU’s Hospital Accountability Project

By Will Tanzman

hen SEIU strategists started making a plan in 2001 to organize the hospital industry in Chicago, they saw an incredible opportunity in the infrastructure of community organizations that already existed. Chicago is the original stomping ground of Saul Alinsky, whose legacy continues to this day. The city boasts several dozen vibrant, progressive grassroots organizations, each capable of mobilizing from fifty to five hundred people for whatever campaigns and actions the groups’ leaders decide to pursue. Over the past three decades, organizers have built many of the relationships and networks necessary for coordinated action by progressive and working-class communities.

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1589

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1579