Trident Productions An Abiding Interest in Non profits Social Justice

							                       Trident Productions
                An Abiding Interest in Non-profits,
                 Social Justice and Public Policy

I have always maintained a strong interest in bending my professional
and creative skills to producing media that serve the communications
goals of non-profit organizations and public enterprises that serve
missions that are near and dear to me:

     Youth education, empowerment and risk prevention
     Anti-violence
     Literacy and media literacy
     Free Speech/First Amendment Issues
     Academic Research and Technological Innovation
     Preservation of Legacy
     Societal and Environmental Stewardship

Many of the projects I wrote or produced were recognized by
communications industry organizations and garnered such accolades
as local Emmys, Telly Awards, various state and national service
awards and peer recognition awards. These were collaborative efforts.
If you ask any member of the teams I was engaged in, none of us did
this work for the awards. We did it because we had found a way to
give back to society, to connect our skillsets with larger needs.
Organizations that fellow filmmakers and I have supported over the
years include:

           The National Organization of Women
           The Alert Partnership
           The National Council of Mayors
           The Entertainment Industries Council
           The Big Picture Alliance
           The Philadelphia Public Access Coalition
           Pennsylvania Special Olympics




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                               NPO 101

As an integral part of my professional development, I joined a
professional trade organization (the Media Communications Association
International, formerly known as the International Television
Association). Over more than a decade from 1982-1994, in a
volunteer capacity, I rose through the ranks of this organization from
local (Philadelphia) leadership to regional leadership become the
organization’s first president and chairman of the BOD, in a national
reorganization that I was intimately involved with, from its genesis.
During my terms of office, this was an organization of 10,000
international media professionals drawn from in-house corporate
communications departments, independent contractors, major
corporations who served the needs of television and film professionals
and freelance individuals like me. Although the organization was large,
its paid professional staff was small and as volunteer leaders, many of
the member services provided by the ITVA were administered through
a network of volunteer leaders known as the Executive Council, of
which I was a part. This was, if you will, a crash course in the nature
and responsibility of NPO management, an education that became
more advanced as I rose through the organization’s ranks.

As a local leader, first as Communications Officer of the Philadelphia
Chapter, my responsibility was to create the local chapter’s newsletter,
(by hand in those days). I was the first freelancer to take this
responsibility on in the local chapter’s history, the shift from in-house
to independent contractors reflecting a growing trend in our industry. I
bought my first computer in 1982, taught myself how to create a
newsletter, manage mailing lists, engage professional typesetters and
a mailing service and provide a 12-page monthly communication to
the local chapter’s 300 members at an annual budget of under $2000.

When the local president was unable to fulfill his responsibilities for
representing our membership in the national Executive Council, I
volunteered and for the first time encountered the national leadership
and staff. It was there that I met Fred Wehrli, the ITVA’s national
director, a man who, though I didn’t realize at the time, would become
a mentor and model for my service to this organization and others to
follow. Fred was a model of decorum and professional responsibility.
He and his wife Inez (the Associate Director) had incredibly demanding
jobs satisfying the needs of members for services, volunteer
governance for advice, policy guidance and implementation.




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          Deeper Engagements in Executive Leadership

In my next role as a regional Vice President, (served for 4 years), I
became responsible for what was known as Regional Leadership
Training, in which we were tasked to create an annual weekend
leadership retreat. This event trained the Region’s local leaders on
national policies and procedures, connected inexperienced local leaders
with their more experienced mentor/peers and provided all with the
tools they needed to recruit members, retain members and serve the
needs of incredibly varied constituents. My territory was the Atlantic
region, the nation’s largest, which extended from upstate New York to
Western PA through Washington D.C. These meetings were more than
nuts and bolts training. They were motivational events that were
designed to explore the nature of non-profit leadership, to gain insight
into how conveying an organizational vision translated into a mission
statement and marching orders for member services, benefits and
assured the organization’s ability to keep up with changing times. The
organization depended on its Regional Vice Presidents to serve as
liaisons between local leaders and the national structure. Total budgets
for these events of 12-20 individuals typically ranged from $1000-
$1500.

                           On Becoming
                        An Agent for Change

One of the association’s principle challenges was that its Volunteer
Executive Committee and its Board of Directors were two separate
entities who were frequently at cross-purposes. I championed and
participated in the national impetus to consolidate these two bodies
and thus to serve our members better. Our membership and in fact
the organization were always under tremendous stress. In this era,
corporate America had just begun radical downsizing and consolidating
its employee base. The impact of this “downsizing” was
disproportionately felt by our members, many of whom started careers
with stable corporate jobs and then in a stroke of a pen, found
themselves unemployed, their work outsourced, their financial futures
and those of their families jeopardized.

It became imperative, that we in Executive Leadership unite in our
efforts to provide new resources and opportunities for training and
professional development to our colleagues, many of whom were in
deep crisis. It was in this environment that I was elected and
assumed the mantle of the organization’s first President and Chairman
of the BOD. I was also the first independent contractor to take on this



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role. I young and inexperienced, but I was surrounded by people in
whom I placed my trust, my BOD, my President Emeritus, the
association’s general council and last, but first, the association’s
Executive Director, the aforementioned Mr. Wehrli and his small staff
of dedicated association management professionals.

The first crisis that I had to confront was the discovery of malfeasance
on the part of the association’s bookkeeper, who as it turned out, had
systematically embezzled, over the course of some twenty months, a
significant sum of money from membership dues accounts. At my very
first Executive Council, presiding as national president, instead of the
challenge of conveying vision and leadership, I had to manage a full-
blown crisis, to convey that the staff and volunteer leadership had
uncovered the crisis, had taken steps to manage it and had put
safeguards in place so that such malfeasance would never happen
again. With the support of my colleagues I was able to convey these
messages and allay the concerns of local leaders whose principal
concerns were that the dues paid by the organization’s members were
being put to the causes for which they were intended.

In my career from local to regional to national leadership, I had always
seen myself as a change agent, as somebody who kept abreast of
developments and opportunities presented by the larger business and
technology environments we operated in and sought to engage those
trends to benefit, primarily our membership, but not ending there. One
of my principal professional mandates became improved
communications. As online communications were coming to the fore, I
saw an opportunity to provide members with a computer-based
network of peer exchange and professional development. On a parallel
track, it became apparent that the demands on volunteers
necessitated that they receive tools to discharge their volunteer
leadership roles and preserve their professional and home lives.

With this mandate, I became the lead architect for the organization’s
shift toward electronic communications, first through a BBS special
interest exchange, then a series of nationally televised
teleconferences, then through an intranet/extranet governance
structure which is known in enterprise circles today as e-governance.
We rode the crest of the birth of the Internet to develop new models of
service and engagement that the organization uses today on a routine
basis. In 1994, it was hardly routine. It was new, wholly original and
thought to be experimental and even controversial. I worked closely
with the association’s staff, volunteer leaders and general counsel to
create a system that complied with the association’s bylaws and their



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overall intent of providing members with services and leadership. We
made it work and in so doing, created a model that persists and is
widely engaged in a variety of for-profit and not-for-profit enterprises.

As mentioned above, I have always been concerned with my own
personal ability to engage my skills to the betterment of society. As a
national leader, I extended that vision to recreate the ITVA’s national
service project, an initiative that sought out a deserving nonprofit
cause, then sought to help a worthy national organization or network
of organizations with communications tools—i.e., Public Service
Announcements, promotional documentaries and professional services
consultation. This is also an enduring legacy that the organization
engages in.

My final and arguably most important contribution to the ITVA was to
create a legacy of “visioning” and “long-range planning.” In 1993, I
discovered and was profoundly influenced by a work by Warren Bennis
and Burt Nanus called Visionary Leadership: Creating a Compelling
Sense of Direction for Your Organization. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1992. 237pp. (HD57.7 .N367 1992). In this work, the authors lay out
a plan for governing bodies to engage in the business of auditing and
redefining their organizations’ vision, disseminating their findings
throughout leadership and gaining consensus—all toward formulating
mission statements that inspired every action and communication said
organizations engaged in. Using these tools, I was able to convince my
fellow leaders that we could convey a renewed sense of purpose and
energy to our membership and local leadership and for the first time,
we, in our national meetings, set aside significant chunks of time to
move beyond reactive management and engage in a wide-ranging but
intensely focused effort to answer the most basic question

           “What unique value do we offer to the world?”
In so doing we began to nurture our organizational vision, a statement
of principles which informed our mission statement, which in turn
became the engine for policies, procedures and indeed every action of
the governance and staff. Anybody who follows the research of
physicists in celestial mechanics knows of the search for a unifying
theory or statement of principles that holds the universe together. The
visioning process and its outcomes became our “unifying principle.”
Where before we were “reactive,” jumping here to there, engaging
problems or challenges after they occurred, we began to shift our
model toward anticipation and proactivity. I cannot stress how
fundamental and inspirational a shift it was. What I can say is that I
remain deeply committed to the process and find that it holds deep



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insight and benefit for any enterprise that is engaged in important
works.

As one of my outgoing duties as the organization’s Chairman, I was
tasked with the performance appraisal of the Executive Director. For
most of us who’ve worked in the corporate sector, this is familiar
process (on the receiving end), but as the volunteer executive who
was charged with delivery of this important communication to the
organization’s chief employee, I immersed myself in the process so as
to do it and the individual on the other end of the table due diligence.
The delivery of a performance appraisal is a significant responsibility
for two reasons:
      It measures performance of an employee over the previous year
      and can be a powerful impetus for change, improvement or
      recognition of work that is done and to be done.
      It PRESUMES pre-defined milestones, empowerment with
      ongoing, appropriate, clearly communicated expectations and
      objective criteria, and as such, presumes forethought and
      agreement to said milestones.

Based on both the above, if I wasn’t already, I became even more
deeply aware of the “workings of the clock,” the intricacies by which
staffs and executive directors take their marching orders and
discharge their duties on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. It
bears repeating that the performance appraisal presumes that the
employee’s expectations are clearly laid out in a job description and
that performance metrics are understood and agreed to beforehand by
reviewer and the reviewed.

This particular executive had shepherded me through a crisis that
threatened to destroy the organization we’d given our life’s blood to.
He was the same man, who, with my wife’s protracted recuperation
after the birth of my first son, stepped up to help me and the
organization realize the ambitious programs we’d started. This
generous man told me that he would have done the same for any
volunteer leader in my position, as indeed he’d done for others, but at
the time, it felt like more than a personal favor. It defined for me, in
an indelible way, the ethic of mentoring and remains a model that I
carry forward to this day.

Over the next six years, after the birth of my first son, I retired from
active volunteer duty to help my wife rebuild her health and build my
copywriting and corporate filmmaking business, though I remained in
touch with my colleagues in the ITVA organization. As a lifetime



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member and member of the Circle of Past Presidents, I am called upon
to deliver advice and consultation to the organization. When I can, I
offer the association my services.

                        On Providing Support
                          For the Neediest


When my oldest boy was in first grade, another opportunity came to
the fore, through a friend who was engaged with an organization
called the Big Picture Alliance, a Philadelphia NPO that teaches digital
filmmaking skills to at-risk youth in the Greater Philadelphia area. As
a member of this organization’s BOD:
      I sat on executive search and job description task forces
      Spearheaded the effort to reform the organization’s meetings
      with e-governance
      Oversaw community outreach building through a new and
      improved Internet site.

The result of the latter was www.bigpicturealliance.org, for which the
organization was awarded a Webby Honorable Mention as presented
by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. The Webby
Awards are a set of awards presented to the "world's best websites."
As a BOD member I donated in excess of $20,000 in copywriting,
project management and information architecture services to this
worthy cause. The sole expense to the organization was the $6000
cost of programmers, who I hired and whose work I oversaw. I used
my professional relationship with these computer professionals to
extract far above and beyond $6000 worth of their services. There
were many challenges; expected and unexpected, in the building of a
robust communications engine for a small but important local non-
profit organization, but in the end it was an enduring legacy and a
learning experience of the first order.

It is no simple matter to convey a couple decades of experience in
non-profit engagement in a few pages. I beg your indulgence for the
length of this exposition, but I hope you’ll find in it, the thematic and
functional underpinnings for the Trident Productions service offering to
worthy non-profit enterprises. I have always told friends and
professional contacts that if given an opportunity to serve a non-profit
of good cause in a professional capacity that I would not hesitate.




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