Our Director of Community Engagement, Michelle Gahee Kloss [1], was recently in San Diego producing a piece on the San Diego’s Sheriff Department’s Hate Crime Task Force as well as coordinating an online film screening of Light in the Darkness [2] for San Diego’s KPBS that utilized the new ITVS OVEE platform [3]. OVEE is a new social screening platform that allows for people to participate in discussions online and the screening was a big success for Not In Our Town and KPBS. Michelle is now preparing for our first Law Enforcement webinar as part of our new collaboration with the U.S. Department of Justice COPS Office.

 

Executive Producer Patrice O’Neill [4] has been in Billings, MT, the community featured in our 1995 film that inspired the movement. Not In Our Town Billings remains an active and inspiring group in our growing network.

 

Not In Our School Director Dr. Becki Cohn-Vargas [5] has been putting together a campaign of school assemblies in the Boston-area.  She also had the privilege to catch a performance of Julian Hornik, who has been singing for NIOS events since he was in middle school.

 

Julian performed a song he wrote called, “Altoona, Pennsylvania” that depicts a phone call that late Harvey Milk, the country’s first openly gay politician, received from a young person that gave Milk strength to keep moving forward. In a taped statement to be played if he was assassinated Milk said, “I ask for the movement to continue, for the movement to grow, because last week I got a phone call from Altoona, Pennsylvania, and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope.”

 

On the day of the United States Supreme Court ruled on DOMA, Julian performed his song with the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus in San Francisco. Read more about his performance in The Bay Area Reporter [6] and more about our meetings with Julian here [7]. We wish him the best as he heads to Connecticut to attend Yale University.