On June 19th I had the pleasure of moderating our Story Leads to Action panel with my colleague Judith Helfand, co-founder of both Working Films and Chicken and Egg Pictures. This year’s panel featured the award winning documentary Brooklyn Castle. After watching several clips from the film where we saw the championship chess team and their teachers in action and learned about how budget cuts affected the after school program at I.S. 318 in Brooklyn, we launched into a strategic conversation about how the film can continue to be leveraged to support chess and other high quality after school programming in schools around the country. Filmmakers Katie Dellamaggiore, the film’s outreach coordinator Kali Holloway and a panel of education and after-school experts from the National Education Association (Luis Gustavo Martinez), American Federation of Teachers (Delisa Saunders), The Montgomery County Maryland Council (Hans Reimer), and the Afterschool Alliance (Sarah Simpson) discussed a myriad of ways the film could be used to make change in community based settings, in theaters and at additional film festivals. For a full run down of the details of the event and some of the specifics ideas generated check out this great blog from Chicken and Egg pictures.
