Think Win-Win: Charles Meyer on NCME and Community Cinema

Executive Director of the National Center for Media Engagement (NCME) Charles Meyer outlines his organization's recently announced partnership with ITVS's Community Cinema.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephan Covey’s fourth habit encourages, "Think Win-Win." As Covey points out – and as we’ve discovered in our community engagement work with public media at NCME  – Win-Win is a frame of mind that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions that are mutually beneficial and satisfying. In other words, solutions that grow a bigger pie. 

That’s what effective collaboration is about, too. And collaborating is a key behavior among those with an engagement ethos. There’s no better example than our new “win-win” partnership with ITVS and its highly successful Community Cinema program. In just six years, Community Cinema has expanded to more than 100 communities across the country, producing more than 2,500 screenings and welcoming over 150,000 participants. Its commitment to bringing communities and local organizations together through the featured documentaries aligns perfectly with NCME's CPB-funded mission to support public media in working collaboratively with their communities to discover, understand, and address community concerns.

Starting this fall, NCME will collaborate with ITVS as a National Impact Partner for Community Cinema. As part of this “win-win” arrangement, NCME will bring to Community Cinema our community engagement expertise learned from station experience. We’ll focus on developing and delivering impact strategies and collaborating with stations to capture and convey stories that demonstrate the program’s overall performance and impact in communities. 

Our Director of Television and Digital Media Engagement, Jennifer MacArthur, will host monthly webinars and coach stations on strategies that can leverage the films for local impact. This partnership is an opportunity to deepen our relationship with public television stations, to better understand their needs, and to create efficient, effective strategies of engagement around the great content that is Community Cinema. By integrating Community Cinema into other station-led engagement work, we can help stations grow the pie bigger locally – and that’s a win-win-win for stronger stations, stronger stories, and stronger communities. Plus, we get to work with Dennis Palmieri and the dynamic team at ITVS – and that’s always rewarding. Here’s to a great new season of Community Cinema and its impact in communities.