One Love Foundation: Shifting Social (Media) Norms Film Festival

The short film about relationship violence that you funded, it just went viral.

The Problem

Relationship violence is a public health epidemic that occurs in every community, every demographic group, and every socio-economic profile. It effects 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men during their lifetime, and those aged 16-24 are at three times greater risk of experiencing abuse. One Love’s mission is to combat these staggering statistics for good by bringing relationship health education to all young people. We believe that everyone deserves to be in a healthy and safe relationship regardless of their race, gender, or socioeconomic status and work to ensure that all people have access to information about unhealthy relationships through education about the warning signs of abuse and by raising social consciousness around the issue.

One contributing element to the pervasiveness of relationship violence is the acceptance and promotion of unhealthy relationship behaviors as a normal part of relationships. There are so many ways in which the concept of love hurting, being obsessive, and possessive are promoted in the media we consume. The need to educate young people broadly about the warning signs of abuse and what healthy relationships really are is key to solving this issue. One Love leverages the power of media, namely film, to promote messaging that distinguishes between healthy and unhealthy relationship behaviors. Our powerful video content and discussion-based workshops capture people’s attention and spark conversations that help them identify unhealthy behaviors they see in our videos and experience in their lives while empowering them to lead the charge for change.

The Solution

One Love understands the potential of film to reach new audiences and engage people in community conversations about how to have healthy relationships, but to continue to grow we must produce fresh, relevant content tailored to meet the needs of diverse constituencies. To push this mission forward, One Love is organizing a contest for emerging filmmakers nationwide to capture fresh perspectives on the key issues young people face today relating to relationships. Films will be fictional shorts, between three and ten minutes in length, that examine topics including learning to #LoveBetter, the ways unhealthy relationships effect men and members of the LGBTQIA* communities, and culturally specific relationship norms.

It is our hope that films from diverse voices will create a new way of engaging young people in important conversations about relationships and provide an even stronger framework for them to positively navigate unhealthy situations they encounter. Final work will be screened as part of the One Love Film Festival in February 2019 and two winning films will become part of One Love relationship health curricula used nationally. In addition, the winning films will be promoted through our social media channels and other media partners who have helped generate 85 million views of our content to date. One Love content has been shared by Refinery29 and Buzzfeed and the hope is to work collaboratively with our media partners to disseminate the winning films as widely as possible to meet young people where they are online.

Planned Use Of Funds

The funding from Shared Nation will help One Love provide a grand prize of $15,000 to each of the two finalists in the film festival. Offering such large prizes raises the stakes on getting involved with the contest and encourages filmmakers to not only educate themselves about the issue of relationship violence and become a part of the movement for change but also create high quality content for One Love to share with our online audience.