The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), America’s largest LGBTQ civil rights organization, has released many videos as a part of their #LoveYourNeighbor campaign, which is a project focused on sharing the experiences of members of the LGBTQ community in the South - primarily Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi, with the bigger goal of fighting LGBTQ discrimination in the deep south.
Each video released as a part of this campaign had one individual telling their story relative to their geographical location, and for this post, I focused on the video called Melanie, who is an ally from Mississippi reflecting on the changes she has seen in her own community. All of the different videos were very cohesive in theme but each was also very unique in terms of the kind of people who were featured as well as the experiences that were told in each video. This campaign is focused on highlighting progress made for the LGBTQ community in the south and I think having people tell their personal stories in a video was definitely an effective method. Being able to hear each voice made me as a viewer feel connected to the storyteller, and since everything was being told first person by people who have been personally affected, there is a lot of trust in what they are saying, as opposed to if a narrator was telling the story instead.
I also think that this video series has a really good balance between highlighting issues in the past without making the people in the videos seem like victims. They all tell stories of ultimately being empowered by the places they grew up in, which could have a really positive impact if someone with a similar experience is watching the video. By using this method, it really highlights all of the progress made by efforts of the Human Rights Campaign, as people explain how their situations have gotten better in terms of legislation and with general changes in society. The progress is a good incentive for people to get on board with HRC because they have tangible proof of change that the organization has helped overcome, which could make people more likely to donate or support the organization in some other way.
In terms of the six foundational values, I think liberty and oppression is the most relevant to this particular campaign, because achieving equality is the ultimate goal of the HRC, as well as putting an end to discrimination, and Melanie’s video in particular really focuses on facing oppression in her past, but how things have really gotten better as she has gotten older. I think other secondary values would be fairness, because she talks about the want to just be treated like everyone else, as well as loyalty and betrayal, because of people in her community who have reacted both negatively and positively to her activism, and she explains the different interactions she’s had.
The Human Rights Campaign is an organization with so many different goals and facets, and while videos from this campaign seemed a little more casual in terms of what they are trying to accomplish by releasing these stories, when a lot of their other work is either geared towards getting specific legislation passed, they do work a lot just to create awareness and education about issues facing the LGBTQ community, so in that way it was very consistent and the videos definitely ended on positive notes.
You can watch more videos from the #LoveYourNeighbor campaign here!
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