July 26, 2006

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 in 1998. 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 to 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 for 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.

Looking Forward

Gillian strives to keep the organization evolutionary by offering an unmoderated hour of conversation once a month called “Open Space,” when the staff comes together and shares ideas for the future. Each month, staff members are also encouraged to spend a day off-site to catch up on important reading. Metrics for the organization are available to the public via a dashboard that measures everything from membership and Web site traffic to evaluations by trainees and advocacy progress on Core Partner campaigns.

WITNESS is also racing to be on the forefront of technology. Gillian and her staff and board are well aware of the possibilities of camera phones, RSS feeds, video podcasts and video blogs (“vlogs”) to advance the global human rights movement. They realize that the Internet is decentralizing power, spreading decision-making authority to the edges of organizations and turning top-down models into interactive networks.

In response to these opportunities, WITNESS is now planning to launch a Human Rights Video Hub, a global destination where anyone can upload a video of human rights content for the world to see.

“There is so much activity going on. We could draw on many more sources,” Gillian explained, her eyes flashing with excitement. “The Video Hub should take off like wildfire, and ultimately, we hope it may become a self-moderating, self-sustaining community on a global scale offering enormous resources to the media and to citizens who care about promoting human rights. It could cause a fundamental shift in news coverage as foreign bureaus decline and media are on the hunt for imagery shot by the people most affected.”

And with friends like hers, she just may be able to make a Hollywood ending like that come true.

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.

DID YOU KNOW?

• WITNESS’ latest video, Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror,’was distributed this summer to all members of the U.S. Congress and was shown at the June 27 plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe as part of a global campaign to encourage the U.S. and its allies to abide by national and international law in counterterrorist operations.