The Impact Kickstart 2025 Call for Applications is currently closed. You can visit our call for applications page here to find more information about our application process.
For a documentary film to make a difference, a solid strategy for audience engagement and strong partnerships are key. Filmmakers often lack time to do this work themselves or the expertise and resources to make an impact campaign happen. Emerging filmmakers and underrepresented filmmakers can face the biggest hurdles, despite the immense potential of their projects. Working Films’ response to this challenge is the Impact Kickstart, a program offering in-kind partnership and strategy development to underrepresented filmmakers with feature-length films that hold great promise to catalyze action to address critical and current social issues.
Now in its seventh year, the Impact Kickstart program has helped underrepresented filmmakers create strategic goals for impact and specific plans to engage future partners, funders, and audiences in meaningful ways. Impact Kickstart was created to fill a gap in support for the impact campaigns of underrepresented filmmakers and underrepresented stories.
For over two decades, Working Films has planned and led strategy summits to inform the plans for impact campaigns and solidify partner commitments. Our team works in collaboration with filmmakers to outline priorities including: vision, outcomes, potential partners, priority audiences, strategic screening locations, and opportunities for meaningful action. From there, we work with filmmakers to create an invite list of aligned organizations, build out an agenda, and coordinate the logistics of the strategy summit. Both the film team and partners will leave the strategy summit with a clear sense of each other’s goals, current and future opportunities to leverage the film, and commitments to move the impact campaign forward in priority locations and in front of key audiences.
Two films will be selected for Impact Kickstart in 2025. Each selected filmmaker will receive an Impact Kickstart from Working Films that includes the planning, facilitation and reporting out from a day-long strategy summit with potential partners and key collaborators. This summit will leave filmmakers well positioned to carry out an impact campaign with a clear strategy, goals, partners, and a report that can be used for engaging supporters. Impact Kickstart recipients will also receive impact campaign funding of $60,000 and 1:1 Mentorship support.