The Big Lift
The Big Lift Meeting family needs in a city of widening wealth gaps is a big lift. Dozens of studies show that when parents or guardians are engaged in their kids’ education, it has a huge impact. Not just on academics but on a student’s attendance, self-esteem, and behavior in class. That’s true across income levels. That’s why the San Francisco Unified School District created the position of “family liason” fifteen years ago: to...
Spies of Mississippi: The Campaign to Stop Freedom Summer’s Civil Rights Movement of 1964
Spies of Mississippi Spies of Mississippi is a journey into the world of informants, infiltrators, and agent provocateurs in the heart of Dixie. The film tells the story of a secret spy agency formed by the state of Mississippi to preserve segregation and maintain “the Mississippi way of life,” white supremacy, during the 1950s and ‘60s. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission (MSSC) evolved from a predominantly public relations...
John Carlos Frey on America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border
America’s Stealth War In recent decades, U.S. immigration policies have aggressively targeted families fleeing violence and poverty in Mexico and Central and South America, spawning a network of detention centers that now exist indefinitely along our southern border. The US’s approach to tackling illegal immigration has come under fire for its use of brutal tactics such as deliberately separating families, placing them in...
The Best of Making Contact
Best of Making Contact 2019 Before we jump into our 2020 catalogue, we look back at our favorite shows from 2019. From Artificial Intelligence, to the stigma around women’s periods, from guns and restraining orders to the cost of Insulin, these are the stories that inspired us, taught us something or just made us think differently. Featured shows: Guns and Restraining Orders Legacy of Mistreatment Bad Math: The Risks of...
Pollution Solutions
Pollution Solutions Megafarms and oil & gas producers in California’s Central Valley are some of the worst polluters of local air, soil, and water. We’ll hear how Central Valley residents are pushing back. Later, author Naomi Klein talks about her book, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. But first, we go to Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where we learn how six Native American tribes are harnessing wind power to...
One Long Night: Andrea Pitzer on the Global History of Concentration Camps
The Global History of Concentration Camps “The use of concentration camps changes the world, but going forward, the most predictable outcome of their use is a world with more camps” Today we use a lot of euphemisms: re-education camps, internment, work camps, prison camps, camps for internally displaced people. But before world war one, these prisons were known simply as concentration camps and they started in Cuba in the...
