Joe Berlinger is an American documentary filmmaker and Director of CRUDE: The Real Price of Oil, an epic story about environmental peril and human suffering in the Amazon region of Ecuador.
02/12 — Today we got in touch with Joe Berlinger! “I’m very impressed with this movement’s commitment to helping solve access to clean water for thousands of Ecuadorians. By focusing on what’s needed most today in Ecuador — humanitarian relief — this team is playing an important role in improving the health of Ecuadorians living in the Amazon region. They have my most sincere endorsement.” – Joe Berlinger, filmmaker and director of CRUDE.
www.crudethemovie.com
Joe Berlinger is an award-winning filmmaker, journalist and photographer. His films include the landmark documentaries BROTHER’S KEEPER, PARADISE LOST, and METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER. His most recent film, CRUDE, debuted at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and has received over 20 international awards. Named one of the top five documentaries of the year by the National Board of Review as well as Best Environmental Documentary at Michael Moore’s Traverse City Film Festival, CRUDE is the inside story of the controversial $27 billion “Amazon Chernobyl” case. Exploring the legal battle between 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorean rainforest dwellers and Chevron, the fifth largest company in the world, CRUDE exposes a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.
This is the badge system the Stanford team made for the different action categories within the Social-M movement. Check it out!
The movement referred to in this post runs on the Social-M platform. Here’s the team’s statement:
“Our Social-M team has aligned its Water Bracelet movement with a San Francisco based nonprofit’s mission to provide clean drinking water to 30,000 Ecuadorianindigenous and colonial rainforest dwellersliving amidst oil-contamination in the Amazon.
For decades, oil exploration has been poisoning the water, flora, and fauna of 30,000 Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers, making their native land uninhabitable, and creating epidemics of cancer and rare diseases.
In its initial four weeks, our Social-M team’s movement will launch an online platform of participation that crowdsources innovative marketing and fundraising solutions to address the problem of oil-contaminated water in Ecuador. We will assemble and engage a Stanford student alliance, through which we WILL SPREAD AWARENESS OF THE ISSUE and LAUNCH A CLEAN WATER FUND to introduce the necessary infrastructure to Ecuador to provide potable water.
Our movement’s primary goal is to have 200+ changemakers attend our water bracelet launch party and agree to make the first two pledges below. (Our secondary goal is to secure a total of 1,000 actions by the end of the Social-M Challenge from the 200+ changemakers). Actions are available online to educate, raise awareness, recruit participants, donate money, organize community events, consult on clean water technologies, and critique our movement. We encourage our BlitzBazaar Changemakers to pledge four important actions in this priority order:
1. Pledge to sign up and become a member of the movement.
2. Pledge to attend the Water Bracelet Launch Party.
3. Pledge to take a photo of yourself raising your hand for Ethos Alliance.
4. Pledge to invite a friend to join the movement.
With our Social-M Phase I winnings, our team will DONATE $1.00 FOR EVERY PLEDGE RECEIVED to the Clean Water Fund up to 1,000 pledges. A private donor has pledged $5,000 dollars to the Water Fund if our movement’s number of pledges reaches 1,000. These contributions will fund the first well installation on the ground in Ecuador.
The WATER BRACELETS are handmade Cofan and Secoya bracelets (both indigenous Ecuadorian communities in need of clean water systems). Each bracelet is made from native seeds and natural plant dyes. These bracelets are to be used to spark discussion about the oil disaster in Ecuador, and serve as a signature of participation. Water Bracelets will be awarded to those who attend the Water Bracelet Launch Party.
The WATER BRACELET LAUNCH PARTY will be held at the end of the Social-M contest. Specific event details to be released soon. Stay tuned.
The MOVEMENT WILL CONTINUE TO GROW; Stanford will be the first school of many to host a campus-wide Water Bracelet movement. Here’s a taste of what’s to come:
• We will re-launch this micromovement at Berkeley University and schools nationwide to raise awareness about the environmental crisis and Water Fund.
• Water Bracelets will become a signature in San Francisco and Silicon Valley among policymakers, celebrities, business executives, professors, and students.
• We will amass the “Raise Your Hand” pictures take by each individual in this movement, as well as a group picture of attendees of the Water Bracelet Launch Party. We will create a viral video to show the extent of support for the rainforest communities, and to spread the message worldwide.
Through the use of persuasive technologies, we can spread the word about this little known environmental disaster, build a national alliance, and provide immediate relief to those in need of clean water.
We encourage you to message a movement leader with questions or comments.”
A quick refresher: The Social-M Challenge is a ongoing competition where students design, ignite, and grow sustainable social movements that install lasting behavioral shifts on campuses and beyond.
Phase I was focused on idea-vetting, team-building, resource-gathering, and movement design (January 9th – January 23rd, 2010). Phase II is where teams are given one month to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of their submitted plans (January 25th – February 22nd, 2010).
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The Ethos Social-M Team at Stanford aligned its movement with the mission of Ethos Alliance. The team is comprised of Stanford students and Stanford Ethos Chapter Leaders (also Stanford students) recruited on the university campus during the 30-Day Tour.
The Ethos Social-M team has recently designed a winning micro-movement they are calling Water Bracelet. The team was awarded $1,000 for this concept by a panel of judges and experts in persuasive technology at Stanford University. These initial funds will be used to spark the Water Bracelet movement (described below).
As a nonprofit organization, Ethos Alliance is focused on alleviating the suffering of 30,000 Ecuadorians drinking oil-contaminated water by providing water purification systems.
The initial goal of the Water Bracelet movement is to persuade 200 Stanford students to complete online challenges and invite them to attend a Water Bracelet Launch Party.
Each student is invited to play a series of online challenges. Each completed challenge earns a participant a certain number of points based on the effort required to complete the challenge and the influence it carries. When a certain number of points is reached, the participant is awarded entry into a Water Bracelet Launch Party, scheduled for early March 2010. At the Launch Party, Ethos Alliance members can assign specific next steps to each student in attendance based on their interests and schedules. Each eligible participant will receive a “Water Bracelet” at the door of the party.
We’ll fill you in on what exactly the challenges are in an upcoming post. They are designed to educate participants, raise public awareness, and collect donations for the Ethos Alliance water fund in fun and engaging ways.
The “Water Bracelets” are handmade bracelets by the Cofan (a tribe located in the affected area). Each bracelet is made from native seeds and natural dyes from Ecuadorian plants. They are to be used to spark discussion, as well as a symbol of “I Raise my Hand with Ethos Alliance” and “I’ve Become a Part of the Solution in Ecuador.”
200 students at Stanford is a reasonable goal for the four weeks allotted to implement the movement. But its implications are much larger. While this particular Water Bracelet movement is only for Stanford students, the movement can be replicated once it has been tested and refined. For example, Berkeley University, one of the top 10 activist campuses in the nation, will be a great host for a movement with 1,000 participants. Streamlined movements can then be launched on colleges and universities by Ethos Chapter Leaders nation wide.
It’s a great way to initiate a large student following, introduce the situation in Ecuador to the public, and provide actionable steps for supporters of the Ethos Alliance mission.
In what ways did the project use, or leverage social media to achieve its goals?
Use of photos, video and GPS coordinates plotted in GoogleEarth to prove every well built. Using multimedia and Internet tools existing and interested donors are able to read up and get stories behind each well/project, helping to connect them to the cause (http://www.charitywater.org/projects/map.htm) and to experience a complete story when the wells are drilled and in place. This sort of deep engagement with donors helps them see where their money is going and what differences it makes.
Partnering with Twestival to host a virtual multi-city fundraising campaign using Twitter to raise $250,000 and which brought worldwide public awareness to the global water crisis.
Creation of the online September campaign, asking people born in the month of September to give up birthday presents and ask for donations instead. This campaign was housed online and featured videos and photos of the areas in need of wells as well as the ability to donate and match funds online. The campaign raised $1+ million, funding over 200 water projects in communities in need.
Twenty teams of MBA students in Boston College’s Carroll School of Management recently competed to propose ideas that could both create innovative business opportunities for the major telecommunications firm Verizon and do good. In the end, one team came up with a proposal designed to make their student competitors and the competitors of the business green with envy.
And another interesting CSR challenge that took place at Stanford University: http://tinyurl.com/yfwbyuk
A team of MBA students from the Stanford Graduate School of Business have won the 3rd Annual Rotman Net Impact Corporate Social Responsibility Case Competition. During the competition, held on November 22 at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, thirty-three student teams from universities across North America competed to solve a business challenge using social and environmental factors in addition to the bottom line.
Here are some of our favorite sites that combine Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with social media to spread the news, connect people, develop strategy, and initiate action and good.
JustMeans.com is a twitter domain and discussion central for CSR. Big companies like Hewlett Packard, Seventh Generation, and Timberland post CSR related thoughts. The site has a global perspective with 40% US & Canada, 35% UK, and 25% other. JustMeans boasts over 500,000 unique visitors in 2008 and 1.9 million page views per month, ensuring diversity of perspective and experience. Worth checking out.
TakingItGlobal is in fact, very global, with almost 250,000 members, in 269 countries and 1169 schools. You can even interact with the site based on a regional orientation; Europe, Asia, Africa etc. The site is chock full of features. You can create your own page, access resources, sign petitions, download action guides, join others in making lifestyle resolutions, utilize educator resources, or access how-to guides for policy makers and community organizers – whew! If you’re a student, or are interested in sustainability, activism and global issues affecting the environment, politics and society at large, then this site is for you.
My.SocialActions.com will help you find and share opportunities to change the world by collecting information from other sites, and then letting members promote the ideas they like best.
This Saturday, Richie Goldman (EA Founder) was a panel speaker at Stanford University’s Converge 2010 and one of the mentors to the Social-M Challenge. Richie spoke on his 29 year career as co-founder of Men’s Wearhouse, founding Ethos Alliance, and how the planning Ethos’s CSR campaign has progressed over the past 9 months. Video coming shortly.
Under the Social-M Challenge, participants enter a contest where they will have six weeks to design and implement their own sustainability-focused social movements. Ethos Alliance will be working with our Stanford Ethos Chapter leaders to promote a focus on Ecuador and getting the word out about CSR.
The contest will take place in two phases:
Phase 1: PLANNING (January 9th – January 23rd, 2010) Teams will submit formal campaign plans to a panel of expert judges. The five best plans will be awarded $1,000 to aid in implementation.
Phase 2: IMPLEMENTATION (January 25th – February 22nd, 2010) All teams are given one month to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of their submitted plans. The winning Phase 2 movement will be awarded $15,000 in seed funding and exclusive consulting support to grow their movement.
STAY POSTED! More updates coming regularly from this exciting event.
Day 30/30. This is the final post for the 30 day tour.
“On the Road for Ethos Alliance” has been a terrific journey.
We have come to understand the necessity of coming to Ecuador to see the environmental damage first hand. It was our utmost hope and intention on the second part of this tour, the portion spent in Ecuador, to share these issues with you as clearly as possible. We hope we have conveyed the importance of the health affects from oil contamination, those fighting relentlessly to find resolve in a legal trial against Chevron, and the indigenous culture that has been displaced, and in many ways destroyed forever.
In the coming months we encourage those of you who have followed this tour to reflect on your role, from wherever you come from, as oil consumers. And to encourage your family and friends to understand that the gasoline you use may come from a multinational company that in the past or in the present, has not lived up to corporate social responsibilities.
Texaco Oil Company (acquired by Chevron in 2001)
With a national (and now international) following, with chapter leaders abound at the universities visited during the first 20 days of our tour, we are confident that Ethos Alliance will be able to bring powerful aid to this environmental crisis.
When we return home tomorrow, we will begin organizing the following we have built. We will review the information shared with us by those involved in the case, the indigenous people of Ecuador, and those who have medical illness due to pollution.
We take home this emotion and information to make the best decision on how to aid in the effort to create a healthier living environment. We will organize and act as quickly as possible, and we will decide carefully how to integrate our efforts with those of existing organizations and the best interests of those directly affected.
In the immediate, this means creating safe water supplies, sanitation facilities and hygiene-related facilities. This means improving the medical facilities and treatment centers.
Raise your hand with Ethos Alliance. Find out how you can help here. And as always, thank you for your continued support.
A child from one of the pollution-affected communities.
Contact us at info@ethosalliance.org. Stay tuned to www.ethosalliance.org for updates and the development of Ethos Alliance projects.
Here are some articles that have been written about Ethos Alliance we want to share with you in case you haven’t seen them as they were published:
An Introduction by Ethos Alliance Founder, Richie Goldman
For decades, the people of the Amazon in Ecuador have been living -- and dying -- from the largest oil-related environmental disaster in human history. This presents one of the greatest humanitarian opportunities for corporate leadership in our time.
