Creative Visions Foundation
To date Creative Visions Foundation has incubated over 150 creative activist projects and productions, reaching over 90 million people. Furthermore, these projects have reached 195 countries across the globe, and a recent evaluation of our finances, found that for every $1 donated to Creative Visions Foundation, $2.44 is raised for our fiscally sponsored creative activist projects. Additionally, since the launch of our Dan Eldon Center for Creative Activism in Malibu, we’ve hosted more than 100 events, serving over 10,000 people through educational seminars and community program. Specifically, as an Academy, CAP’s Academy Series and ON Rev Speaker Series host approximately 20 events annually, which produce original content and generate roughly 300 minutes of finished productions a year.
Some notable projects to have come out of CAP include the following:
Video Volunteers: One of CVF’s first creative activist, nurtured by founders Kathy Eldon and Amy Eldon Turteltaub here in LA, Jessica Mayberry had a vision to teach illiterate Indian women how to use film to tell their stories and fight their battles. We helped her see it with business strategy, creative consulting, journalism education, and board development. Today Video Volunteers has created the largest, most diverse network of salaried community producers in the world. To date, Video Volunteers has created 15 community video units, trained 150 producers, employed 100 full-time producers, held 1100 screenings, reached 200,000 people through screenings, produced 60 video magazines and 50 additional films, hosted regular video screenings in 350 villages and slums, spurred 2,000 people to take direct action.
Happy: The latest documentary from Academy Award nominee and Angeleno Roko Belic, Happy sets out to answer the question and stimulate conversations around, “What makes you happy?” With a Facebook force of more than 30,000 Facebook fans, Happy quickly climbed to the #1 documentary on iTunes and declared February 11th, 2012 World Happy Day, holding over 600 screenings of the documentary in 60 countries on all 7 continents.
Living on One: A documentary about 4 LA-based college students who spent their summer living on $1 a day in rural Guatemala to better understand extreme poverty, Living on One has screened in 25 cities to 52,000 people & launched a Student Microfinance Movement with participation from 55 universities. A resource for students to take microfinance classes, find internships, and attend conferences, the Student Microfinance Movement builds the skill set necessary to become successful social entrepreneurs.
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- 2013 Grants Challenge
Creative Activist Program
An Incubator, Academy, & Agency, our Creative Activist Program (CAP) is a place for LA’s creative activists to turn ideas into action & for the Los Angeles community at large to become a force for change. In LA alone, we incubate, educate, & represent over 45 different media & arts projects, ranging in media types (film, multimedia, music, visual arts, & more) & focusing on our 6 core causes (human rights, youth & education, global consciousness, environment, gender equality, & health & wellness).
Individually, our creative activists exemplify a heightened level of social connectedness. Having identified their cause, they use a media type to address an issue & inspire action. Their work in turn demands social interaction & civic engagement, & their projects draw community involvement & local volunteerism. As a collective, CAP fosters the community necessary to galvanize action around these issues & improve the social well being of Los Angeles.
Current LA-based CAP projects include: THE IMAGINATION FOUNDATION Grown out of “Caine’s Arcade” & with support from the Goldhirsh Foundation, the Imagination Foundation (IF) turned a viral video with 6 million views into a movement that now finds, fosters, & funds creativity & entrepreneurship in kids. In 2012 IF launched its Global Cardboard Challenge & hosted over 270 events in 41 countries. TENDER GREENS SUSTAINABLE LIFE PROJECT A dynamic farming program developed by Tender Greens Restaurants’ founders, the Sustainable Life Project (SLP) provides transitioning foster youth with a safe, consistent learning & living environment. To date, SLP has nurtured a class of interns to complete the program & become Tender Greens employees. FOSTER THE FUTURE This project is the band Foster the People’s philanthropic initiative that works with charities & communities to influence the act of giving back & creating community. In LA they work with 826LA, Breakaway Education, LA Guerrilla Gardening, & Social Justice Learning Institute. The implementation of CAP throughout LA will consist of 2 different levels of engagement: 1) with individual high impact creative activists & 2) with the LA community as a whole. To our selected creative activists & their projects, we provide direct services as an Incubator, Academy, & Agency. As an Incubator, we offer strategic & narrative development to map out their goals & objectives. We host an annual CAP Summit at our community Center in Malibu where we exchange ideas & share lessons learned. We also provide our creative activists with the ON Revolution, a resource-rich online social network where they can collaborate around their projects & meet one another’s needs. As an Academy, we nurture our creative activists’ talents & introduce them to critical knowledge through workshops & seminars in our CAP Academy Series & through panel conversations in our ON Rev Speaker Series. All content from these series is filmed & made available on the ON Revolution social networking site. As an Agency we connect our creative activists with the people, funding, & networks they need. We also provide fundamental services such as fiscal sponsorship while matching them with industry professionals for mentorship. Our engagement with the LA community at large will take form as an expansion of CAP, geared for the public. We will hold an LA Creative Activist Conference for a broad audience. Fashioned in the style of an arts & media-centric TED Conference, this will be a fusion of our CAP Summit & our ON Rev Speaker Series. The Creative Activist Conference will highlight the work of our creative activists, offer panels about our most successful projects, & host forums on innovate solutions for LA’s pressing issues. This gathering will provide opportunities for the community to get involved through civic engagement & volunteerism. As part of CAP’s immersion into LA, we will offer Angelenos exclusive access to the ON Revolution site, our ON Rev Speaker Series, & our creative activists’ satellite community events. Armed with the endless possibilities of digital media, today’s Angelenos are all producers, journalists, storytellers – piecing together a collective narrative & engaging in a global dialogue. What story will we tell? Thanks to LA2050, this year we have the chance to make LA’s story count – to make it a story about the community that tackled issues like poverty, global warming, human trafficking, & educational inequity with films & words & photos. By nurturing LA’s creative activists & extending their work deep into the LA community, CAP will enliven, encourage, & sustain social connectedness throughout LA. CAP’s 45+ active local projects provide Angelenos with the opportunity to participate in the solutions that will determine the future of LA. Ultimately, our Creative Activist Program has the ability to make the story of LA2050 that of a community rich in social interaction, civic engagement, & volunteerism.