Get a Job: Meredith Blake

One social entrepreneur, one law school degree, one organization built from scratch and now 11 Oscar nominations with Participant Productions.

By Amanda Angelotti, Campus Progress
Wednesday March 1, 2006

In college at UC Berkeley, Meredith Blake realized she could make a career out of social change, so she set off for law school, not by default like some of us ambitious young things, but as a means to pursue public interest law as a tool for social change. And following graduation, she hit the ground running and immediately launched a non-profit, Break the Cycle, to empower youth to end domestic violence. Currently, she is an Executive Vice President at Participant Productions, which means she has a hand in launching thought provoking films like Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck and their accompanying action campaigns while chilling with George Clooney.

So how did Meredith land such a killer job? She knew she wanted to leave the world a better place than she found it, and her interests and goals fell into place. Ironically, though, it’s in part what she didn’t know that helped make her an early success.

Meredith founded her organization at age 25, but in the grown-up world, bias abounds against young people, so we must either overcome it or work around it. (Is there some weird societal rule that with age comes the need to disparage younger generations for their alleged or anecdotal apathy, loose morals, and destructiveness? I’ll call it Grandpa Simpson’s Law.) Learning to effectively make nice and learn from older, more established nonprofits as well as corporate America is critical to getting an organization off the ground. Once you get your foot in the door, you have to be prepared to know what to do with your new-found access. This kind of wheeling and dealing is not for the faint of heart but Meredith made it work.

The inspiration for the organization was borne from one of her first relationships, which was an abusive one, but she didn’t recognize it as domestic violence until later. She did notice that, though there are many domestic violence programs, there was nothing targeted towards young people. When she first founded Break the Cycle, which offers free legal services and other programs, she was her only employee and ran the organization out of her living room. Less than a decade later, the program has 24 staff members and a budget of around $1.5 million.

According to Meredith, “I really in some ways had no idea what I was getting into.” Yet she pursued her cause so aggressively because of, not in spite of, this fact. “If you’re passionate about it you can do anything…If I knew all the obstacles going into it I would have been a little bit more fearful and less fearless.”

But is ignorance bliss? Pure passion and ambition would only have gotten Meredith so far. She also had a framework, a cause, and people she could look to for advice as well as support. (Amongst other financial backers, she approached for start-up money many of her former law school classmates who had gone straight to lucrative jobs at major firms.) Now she wants to pass her knowledge down to any readers out there who want to successfully affect change in their own communities.

See, Meredith is a social entrepreneur. “I love bringing business skills to the social sector…[to] create new ways of solving old problems and also figure out how to make those changes sustainable for the future.” Point being, you can go to business school without selling your soul to The Man. It may sound like a snooze fest to those of us not into TPS reports, but it can offer you marketable expertise and valuable insight from outside the “non-profit bubble.”

Meredith reminds us that it is critical to seek out people with common cause. If there’s already an organization that supplies low-income kids with money for school uniforms, don’t start a new group with an identical objective and try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, join or collaborate with existing groups already doing good work to bring more force to your cause. Progressives have learned all too well that fractured issue groups can dilute a message and make for tiresome and unnecessary turf battles. So, if you don’t want to join with other groups, be sure to identify another unique but synergistic niche. Maybe the kids don’t need more school uniforms but they could use schools supplies.

As she built her network in the Los Angeles area, Meredith began to understand the influence of the music, entertainment, and sports industries on the people that she wanted to help, so she established business relationships within them to conduct outreach and amplify her message. After taking her nonprofit national in 2003, her Hollywood ties facilitated the transition into her latest gig as EVP of Corporate and Community Affairs at Participant, as well as president of the related Participant Foundation. Participant Productions is the indefatigable new company founded by eBay entrepreneur Jeff Skoll two years ago. This has been quite a good few months for Participant as it received 11 Academy Award nominations for Good Night, and Good Luck, North Country, Syriana and Murderball and An Inconvenient Truth, their new documentary about global warming starring Al Gore, opened to strong reviews at Sundance.

Participant’s mission is to produce quality, enjoyable social issue films that can be commercially viable – a true rarity. Good Night and Good Luck, the most profitable of their nominated films, made slightly over $30 million and was produced for $7 million while Syriana’s domestic gross just barely equaled its production costs.

How many times have you walked out of a movie theater after seeing a powerful, socially relevant film feeling all motivated only to realize that there is no clear outlet for affecting change? No more. Part of Meredith’s job is to develop action campaigns attached to each of their films.

In developing new issue campaigns, Meredith looks either for “tipping point” issues where Participant can make a difference or areas where there has been a real lack of activism. For instance, when Good Night, and Good Luck premiered, Participant launched a “Report it Now” campaign to encourage citizen journalists with partners like ACLU and Salon.com. When Participant released the DVD of Murderball, they launched the Get Into the Game campaign and offered free copies of the DVD and a toolkit to college students who can host fundraising events with money going to purchase sports equipment for athletes in need as part of a partnership with the Paralympics. It’s a bona fide progressive Hollywood political agenda in which I, for one, am glad to take part. (Note: The Center for American Progress, parent of Campus Progress, hosted the Washington, DC, premiere of Good Night, and Good Luck, and Campus Progress is working with Participant on upcoming efforts to engage young people in discussions around issues raised in Participant films.)

Alright, so what have we learned? Meredith is of the dream big or go home school. And she’s knows that any do-gooder who wants to make impact should be prepared for work to consume your life at times. Still, as many of us know, non-profit burnout is a definite reality, and Meredith instructs us to find balance. “I’d rather give 100% for the next fifty years than 150% for five years.” Know that you will lose some battles, but look for moments that affirm your idealism and challenge your cynicism. Pick your pet issue, blast through barriers set up by the old guard, learn from trailblazers, and network, network, network. Got it? Now go get a job.