July 8th, 2009
The Aaron Spelling of the Congo
I recently had the good fortune of traveling to Washington, DC to see my friend and colleague Ben Olander present, along with his business partner, Tomas Apodaca, their work from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ben and Tomas had been invited to DC by Bill Strassberger, the Chief of Public Affairs in the Bureau of African Affairs at the State Department.
Having known Ben for years and heard of his work but never quite understood exactly what he was doing, when I heard that he would be presenting I leaped at the chance. And it was well worth it. In addition to meeting one Evagelia Touvalareas who is doing her own powerful work with women in Saudi Arabia seeing Small Power’s work on a big screen with an audience of between 70 to 100 people really drove home the powerful message of their work.
After about 20 to 30 minutes of conversation and a screening of the TV show that smallpower has created, the crowd rushed up to greet Ben and in what has to be one of the great summary lines of all time, the gentleman in this picture applauded my friend by saying, “You are the Aaron Spelling of the Congo.”
But you don’t have to just take my word for it – surf on over to smallpower.org to read the inspirational and fantastic tales of how to create a tv series of warmth and honesty in one of the world’s most horrific (and forgotten) warzones.
An Animated Video Produced in the Congo from Todd Krieger on Vimeo.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.