Funding Projects Around the World

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens

Since 2003, Stephanie Guyer-Stevens has been the executive producer of Outer Voices, a radio documentary series about women leaders in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. She just wrapped up her fifth documentary called “The Price of Rice”—a profile of Vietnamese environmental leader, Tranh Thi Lanh. Stephanie talks about how she’s been able to fund her international projects.

I started Outer Voices as a response to my previous work in social change “organizing” with a good familiarity of the non-profit world, including experience in grantwriting and fundraising. I was really comfortable talking about the meaning of the work I was setting out to accomplish on a social level – not just about making radio. This made it possible for some funders to relate to the core values of the work we were doing. Not a traditional way of getting funding for media, but I think there is more legitimacy for producers who are honest about their social change motivations in creating work. By being honest about our intentions, our mistakes, our learning process, and our results, we gained respect from funders, and we all learned a great deal both about the work and about the subjects we covered.

We were fortunate to receive Ford Foundation funding—not enough to fund the whole shebang, but it was invaluable in giving us a great deal of credibility, so over the years we were able to build on that.

Outer Voices was really focused on creating an interface between the women we were profiling and the audience for the documentaries. The funders who have been our ardent supporters are foundations and individuals who have a vested interest in having these stories heard and the topics we were covering, rather than having a specific interest in funding media.

It was definitely harder to convince American funders about the necessity of telling stories from other parts of the world and about the relevance of international voices for an American audience. I figured a small group like ours could do more for people who were receiving no media coverage at all. That assumption has proven to be true, but the funding for these regions is also harder to come by.

There are definitely some ardent funders of international work, and they are always grateful to help create media about places and people that they care deeply about. Our production costs overseas were much lower, because we were working in a part of the world where life is much less expensive. 

I think the real obvious lesson I learned in doing this work is that we have far too little competition. There is so very little independent media being done overseas–funding is only one small part of the equation. I’d encourage anyone, if this is the shape of your bliss, to go for the golden ring.