Sudanese Education Fund (SEF)

The Sudanese Education Fund asked me to create a video showcasing its Saturday Bridges Program. The SEF is a non-profit founded to support the community of Lost Boys that settled in the Greater Boston Area in 2001. Since then, these S. Sudanese refugees have gained U.S. citizenship and have begun marrying young women from S. Sudan. The SEF started the Saturday Program to address the educational, social, and cultural needs of these women and their children. I recorded audio and worked with Ellen Morgan’s photographs to produce this video.

In the Midst

In the Midst is a multimedia documentary project focusing on the lives of liberal American Presbyterian missionaries and their far-reaching work. Now in their late 80s and early 90s, these individuals studied the then-radical philosophies of theologians such as Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mahatma Gandhi. They vowed to live simply, in the midst of the poor, whether they were in rural Tennessee, New Haven, Connecticut, or Rajpur, India. They let what they identified as The Holy Spirit move them to bring pacifism, ecumenicism, and social justice with them wherever they lived. Their influence reaches from the rural Indian villagers with whom they worked through the boarding schools they administered to their own children and grandchildren, many of whom have chosen to continue working in the midst of poverty and injustice to enact positive social change. These elders link Christian gospel to social justice. They trace their history back to American abolitionism. They want their stories heard at a moment when right-wing fundamentalists struggle to shape political agendas around the world.

Rev. Robert C. Alter