A Note on
the Word

Where the Word Began

Filmanthropy is a blend of two words, film and philanthropy, and the joining of them was deliberate. As far as the public record shows, the word was introduced around 2007 and 2008 by Ted Leonsis, a media entrepreneur and the founder of the documentary platform SnagFilms, which he built alongside Steve Case, Miles Gilburne, and chief executive Rick Allen. SnagFilms launched in the summer of 2008 with a catalog of documentaries and an invitation to audiences to become a filmanthropist by helping good films find an audience. Leonsis used the word to describe film aimed at the issues the world most needs to face. He built the word himself, and we are glad to say so plainly.

The People Who Carried It

A word only lives if people choose to carry it, and several did, in different places and for different reasons.

In 2009, the FILManthropy Festival began in the Los Angeles area, founded by Jodi Fung through her nonprofit the Sirens Society, honoring filmmakers who use film to make the world better and raising support for the causes those filmmakers championed. Around the same time, in Dallas, the producer Melina McKinnon and her company M3 Films used the word for filmmaking made deliberately to raise awareness and funds for a cause.

The term moved through the documentary world. Pat Mitchell, the first woman to lead PBS and later the head of the Paley Center for Media, used it. Jeff Skoll, the founder of Participant Media, the most influential company ever built around films with a social purpose, engaged with it in the philanthropy press. Filmmakers and critics debated it on festival panels, and journalists carried it into print.

In 2017, Fisayo Fadahunsi founded Filmanthropy CIC in London, a community-media social enterprise that uses participatory filmmaking and workshops to build engaged citizens of all ages. In 2020, the Filmanthropy Foundation was established in Burbank, California, a nonprofit supporting creatives and veterans in the film industry.

Each of these is a separate effort, built by different people, in different places, with its own mission. Each gave this word meaning and momentum long before Social Effects existed. We honor all of them, and we name them here because the history of a word belongs to the people who built it.

One Wide Field

We have chosen a broad definition of Filmanthropy, the one you will find on our home page: “Filmanthropy is where the love of film and the love of humanity meet. Everything a film, or the making of it, gives to the people and communities it touches: proceeds, materials, presence, or something permanent left behind.” The history above shows why that breadth is earned. From Leonsis naming the word to the sustainability pioneers who followed, each carried it somewhere new, and the field kept expanding to hold them all. It is still expanding. Our Filmanthropy Ledger tells that story in full, from the earliest precedents through to what we consider the cutting edge: Regenerative Filmmaking, where a production builds something permanent a community keeps long after the cameras leave. Skater Girl showed what that looks like. We believe New Jersey is where it happens next.

Why We Kept the Word

We considered inventing a new word, and we chose not to. Filmanthropy already exists. It is good, and it carries the idea efficiently. Inventing a replacement would have hidden our connection to everyone who came before us. By keeping the word, and being clear about the practice we are building within it, we let the lineage stay visible: the same word, a wide field, and our particular place within it.

We are not the owners of this word. No one truly is. We are one more group carrying it, in our own way, and we are proud to do so in the company of everyone named on this page.