Free Family Movie Nights: A Surefire Way to Build Your Base
We’re approaching the summertime and that means we have plenty of opportunities in the next few months to build our base memberships.
One of the most certain ways to do this is by holding free Family Movie Nights at a local library or community center. Programming is extremely easy, overhead should be less than $50, and it creates a great chance to meet your neighbors while showing them the Green Party is an organization that exists for much more than just their vote.
Based on my own personal experiences, here are some suggestions:
Don’t insist on purely agit-prop programming
It certainly makes sense that one would be inclined to create a program based solely around progressive political issues. However, that’s not the proper way to think about this. While you and those in your age demographic might find documentaries featuring Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn fascinating, children don’t. They want something fun and enjoyable. So include in your program enjoyable materials.
Your program should span approximately 3 hours and include both a feature as well as some shorts.
Your event should be formulated as if it were an old fashioned day at the cinema. Before the advent of television and home video, the going to the cinema was a daylong affair. You had newsreels that updated viewers about current events the in same fashion that the news broadcasts function today. The theaters would also show a series of cartoon shorts produced by the film studios, such as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (Warner Bros), Silly Symphony (Walt Disney Studios), and Hanna-Barbera (MGM). Then came the features, usually two but sometimes more depending on the circumstances. There was first the B-level picture, a low-budget film with minor stars. Then you had the A-level film, which had the major Hollywood actors and a large-scale budget.
You can easily adapt this to contemporary times, particularly with the birth of screening forums like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Vimeo. These on-demand web-based platforms provide a wealth of short film resources for your efforts. One potentially useful resource, if you want to include some ecological programming, is the DisneyNature film label. These are family-friendly nature documentaries, not unlike the old National Geographic films, but with an orientation towards families.
Spend a few dollars on some food for those in attendance.
A few pizzas and drinks go a long way.
Include your accountability partners in the planning.
This is a great way to build, strengthen, and solidify these relationships within your community. You want to avoid parachute activism behaviors here and that means you need to be building from and with the grassroots level in your community. Jey Ehrenhalt at Teaching Tolerance writes:
Parachuting perpetuates two major myths of white supremacy. First, it bolsters the problematic mentality that white people are called upon to “save” underserved neighborhoods of color. While individual actors often possess good intentions, entrenched structural racism means that these intentions can be tainted by this “savior” mindset. The result? White-led organizations try to “fix” communities without consulting its members about their needs or recognizing the expertise of the people closest to the issues.
Second, “parachuting” relies on white supremacist ideology similar to Manifest Destiny: the notion that whites not only can, but are destined to, explore and settle any region of their choosing. White privilege, in other words, comes with a sense of entitlement to enter into any culture that, to the “explorer,” is not native, and then leave again as they see fit.
Karen Washington notes how this phenomenon is similar to colonization, exploiting people and land for profit.
“That’s using people for something under the auspices of social justice,” she says. [Emphasis added]
Above all else, have fun doing this.
This is about building community with your Green Party local serving as a facilitator. You need to go into this with the understanding that building these relationships will take time. Remember this is a long-term project and move forward from there.
Be sure to keep in touch with us and stay active this summer. This is the chance for us to build substantially this summer and we want to help you do this. Feel free to contact us via the homepage and let us know how things are going.
