Black, Indigenous, POC Sci-Fi Screenwriting Lab

Need

Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities have historically been excluded from important decisions about the preservation of air, earth, water, and fire. Over 29% of all new Netflix content falls under the Sci-Fi and Fantasy genre. Despite this exponential growth, racial diversity within the genre (and the film industry at large) remains sorely lacking. In a 2014 study conducted by Lee and Low Books, only 8% of all protagonists in Sci-Fi and Fantasy films were people of color.

Long term impact

The Lab will educate 20 working adults in screenwriting, media literacy, trauma-informed writing approaches and critical race theory. We encourage participants to develop professional relationships with their mentors and each other, as well as the industry professionals we invite to our culminating event where excerpts of the students' films are read by actors. Scripts will be part of the fellows' artist portfolios, providing them with a professional work sample that they may in turn sell.

About the Organization

Community Partners offers expert guidance, essential services, and a strong dose of passion to help foster, launch, and grow creative solutions to community challenges. For more than 20 years, hundreds of individuals, groups, foundations and other institutions have worked with Community Partners to create new nonprofit projects, establish coalitions, and manage major philanthropic initiatives to benefit the region. Our mission is to accelerate ideas into action to advance the public good. One such idea is the Justice for My Sister Collective. The Justice for my Sister Collective uses the arts to create safe spaces within marginalized communities to initiate collective healing and develop local leaders to combat gender-based violence. Our vision is to create spaces where through popular education and art, women and men of all ages build support networks and alliances to understand, prevent, and thereby end the cycle of violence against women, girls, and gender nonconforming folks. The JFMS Collective is a project of the prolific Los Angeles-based nonprofit Community Partners. Our programming was originally birthed from the transnational outreach campaign associated with the award-winning documentary "Justice for My Sister." Launched in 2011, we are the first organization of its kind that was sprouted as a grassroots multi-sectoral outreach campaign led by survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse to prevent gender-based violence using the arts. Our use of documentary and leadership development on a transnational level, with cross-cultural skill-sharing, curriculum, live video chats, and social media initiatives, are other distinguishing aspects of our work. We have two chapters: one in Guatemala and the other in Los Angeles, and partners in several other countries that manage our campaign and distribute our educational materials locally.

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